Mesopotamian Mythology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which god of wind, air and storms was for much of Sumerian history the effective ruler of the gods and of the land, holding the Tablet of Destinies, from whose holy city of Nippur kingship had to be blessed to be legitimate?

Question 2

What is the name for the towering stepped pyramid of solid mud brick, rising in receding stages with a small shrine on the flat top, that stood at the heart of every major Mesopotamian city as a bridge between earth and heaven?

Question 3

Which creature did the sky god release onto the earth at the demand of his daughter, the love goddess, after Gilgamesh publicly rejected her marriage proposal and listed the unhappy fates of her former lovers?

Question 4

What is the Akkadian name for the goddess of love and war worshipped across Babylonia and Assyria, the most important goddess of the later Mesopotamian world, identified with the planet Venus as both the morning and the evening star, and often shown armed and standing on a lion?

Question 5

Which minor goddess, titled 'the wild cow', was the mother of Gilgamesh and a wise reader of dreams, who interpreted his two dreams of a falling star and an axe as meaning that a mighty friend was coming to him?

Question 6

Which underworld god, a throne-bearer of the queen of the dead and a guardian of the gate, was closely associated with snakes and with trees, and is often shown as, or with, a serpent with horns, or with two snakes entwined rising from his shoulders?

Question 7

Which primordial being embodied the salt sea and the chaos before creation, and, enraged by the killing of her consort and the rowdiness of the younger gods, bred an army of eleven monsters and led it against them until the champion of Babylon cut her in two?

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About Mesopotamian Mythology

The myths of ancient Iraq are the oldest written stories we have, first set down in Sumerian before 2000 BC and carried on in Akkadian by the Babylonians and Assyrians for two thousand years more. This quiz covers them in eighty questions. Each describes a god, a hero, a demon, a creature, a text, a city or an idea, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the story and how it survived on clay to be dug up and read again only in the last 170 years. Where a figure has both a Sumerian and an Akkadian name, both are given.

The first pack is the major gods and the shape of things: the sky father Anu, the storm-ruler Enlil, the clever water god Enki; Inanna, goddess of love and war, and her descent to the dead; Marduk of Babylon, who kills the sea-dragon Tiamat and builds the world from her body; the moon god Nanna and the sun god Utu; the mother goddess Ninhursag; the death queen Ereshkigal and the plague god Nergal; the shepherd Dumuzi who dies and returns; the weather god Adad; the great gods called the Anunnaki and the striking lesser gods, the Igigi; the war god Ninurta; and Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

The second pack goes deep into the three central stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh: Humbaba and the Cedar Forest, Shamhat, the Bull of Heaven, the flood survivor Utnapishtim, the alewife Siduri, the ferryman, the stolen plant of youth, the scorpion-men at the mountain of the sun. The Babylonian creation epic: Tiamat's consort Kingu, the Tablet of Destinies, the first gods Lahmu and Lahamu, Apsu's schemer Mummu. The Descent of Inanna: the demons called the galla, the gatekeeper Neti, the loyal minister Ninshubur. Plus the flood epic of Atrahasis; more gods, Ashur, Nabu, Ninlil, Nisaba, Gula, Nammu; and the famous demons and guardians, Pazuzu, Lamashtu, the Anzu bird, the winged bull lamassu, the fish-sages, and the divine powers called the me.

The third pack is the setting and the rediscovery: the cities Uruk, Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Babylon and Nineveh; the ziggurat and the invention of cuneiform; the Sumerian King List with its impossibly long reigns; the New Year festival where the king was ritually slapped; the law stone of Hammurabi and the blue Ishtar Gate; the paradise land of Dilmun; the first named author, Enheduanna, and the first empire-builder, Sargon of Akkad; the priest Berossus who passed the myths to the Greeks; George Smith reading the flood tablet in 1872; the Behistun cliff that unlocked cuneiform; the counting by sixties we still use for time and angles; and Nebuchadnezzar the Second. Because a captioned artefact usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a museum object or a site photo does not, and everything has been checked against standard reference works.