Arabian Desert
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40 free Arabian Desert trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Arabian Desert covers almost the whole Arabian Peninsula, from Jordan and Iraq in the north to the shores of the Arabian Sea. It is the largest desert in Asia, a place of red dunes as tall as skyscrapers, gravel plains, black volcanic fields and summer heat above 50 °C. It is also far livelier than its reputation. People have herded, traded and built cities here for thousands of years. This quiz collects the fun facts people go looking for. It covers the geography of the great sand seas, the animals that cope with the heat and how they manage it, and the customs of the nomads who crossed the sands by camel. It also takes in the explorers who mapped the desert, the legends of cities buried under the dunes, and the famous films that used the landscape as a set. It suits a student working on a deserts project, a traveller heading for the Gulf, or a quiz host who wants a geography round with a few surprises. The early questions are ones most people can reason out. The later ones reward anyone who knows Arabian history and wildlife in detail. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Saudi Arabia, mostly Arabian Desert, is the largest country in the world without a single permanent what?
River
No permanent river flows anywhere in Saudi Arabia, so the country leans on groundwater and desalinated seawater. Its valleys are wadis, which run only after rare rain.
Q 02What does the single hump of the Arabian camel, or dromedary, actually store to carry it through lean weeks?
Fat
Fat, up to 36 kg of it, fills the hump, and the camel burns it for energy when food runs short. A shrunken hump is a sign of a starving animal.
Q 03Which mythical beast may have begun with sightings of the oryx, a white antelope of the Arabian Desert?
Unicorn
Unicorn legends may have begun with oryxes that had lost one of their long, straight horns. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder both listed the oryx among one-horned animals.
Q 04In camel racing across the Gulf states, what has replaced the child jockeys who once rode the racing camels?
Robots
Robots with remote-controlled whips now sit on the camels' backs. Qatar banned child jockeys in 2005 and ordered every race to be run with the machines by 2007.
Q 05Rub' al Khali, the Arabic name of the world's largest continuous sand desert, translates into English as what?
Empty Quarter
Empty Quarter is the literal meaning, and the desert earns it: 650,000 square kilometres of dunes up to 250 metres high, filling the southern third of the peninsula.
Q 06Which 1962 epic film shows its heroes crossing the Nafud desert by camel, a crossing the real raiders never made?
Lawrence of Arabia
Lawrence of Arabia sends its hero across the Nafud to take Aqaba, but in 1917 the tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi refused the detour as unnecessary and the raiders never entered the sands.
Q 07The dunes of the Rub' al Khali near Liwa in Abu Dhabi played the desert planet Jakku in which Star Wars film?
The Force Awakens
The Force Awakens opens on Jakku, where a Resistance pilot is handed a map to Luke Skywalker, and its sand scenes were shot in the dunes east of Liwa.
Q 08Which country, far from Arabia, is home to the world's largest population of feral dromedary camels?
Australia
Australia brought in thousands of dromedaries as outback pack animals from the 19th century, and their wild descendants are now sometimes exported live to Saudi Arabia.
Q 09Fossils found among the dunes of the Rub' al Khali show which large African animal once lived there?
Hippopotamus
Hippopotamus bones lie in dried lake beds among the dunes, beside those of water buffalo and long-horned cattle, proof that heavy rains once filled the basins.
Q 10Which capital city in the centre of the Arabian Desert has a name meaning gardens, after its old palm orchards?
Riyadh
Riyadh grew from a walled town ringed by orchards on the bank of Wadi Hanifa into a city of about seven million people in the middle of the desert.
Q 11Which nomadic herders of the Arabian Desert take their name from an Arabic word meaning desert dweller?
Bedouin
Bedouin comes from the Arabic badawi, a word traditionally set against hadir, the term for settled people. A family unit is still counted as a bayt, or tent.
Q 12Ghawar, buried beneath the eastern Arabian Desert, is the world's largest conventional field of what?
Oil
Oil was struck at Ghawar in 1948 and began to flow in 1951, and the field's southern end runs under the northern sands of the Rub' al Khali.
Q 13Which city carved into rose-red cliffs in Jordan's desert stayed unknown to the West until 1812?
Petra
Petra was the capital of the Nabataeans, Arab traders who grew rich on the desert caravan trade and survived there by collecting every drop of rainwater.
Q 21Until about AD 300, caravans crossed what is now the Rub' al Khali carrying which fragrant resin prized by Rome?
Frankincense
Frankincense, tapped from Boswellia trees, went north by camel until the desert grew too harsh. The old caravan tracks, invisible on the ground, still show up in satellite images.
Q 22Which big cat, whose Asiatic subspecies now survives only in Iran, once ranged across the Arabian Desert?
Cheetah
Cheetah territory once ran from Arabia all the way to India, but the Asiatic form was wiped out everywhere except Iran during the 20th century.
Q 23What coats the sand grains of the Rub' al Khali, turning its great dunes orange, purple and red?
Iron oxide
Q 14Which drink, poured from a long-spouted pot called a dallah, is at the heart of desert hospitality in Arabia?
Coffee
Coffee is roasted, pounded and boiled in front of the guest, then served in a small handleless cup called a finjan.
Q 15The Arabian Desert shares its hot, dry climate with which larger desert, of which it is considered an extension?
Sahara
Sahara conditions carry on east of the Red Sea across the peninsula, and even as an offshoot the Arabian Desert ranks as the largest desert in Asia.
Q 16Which off-road race, first run across Africa and later South America, moved to Saudi Arabia's deserts in 2020?
Dakar Rally
Dakar Rally organisers left Africa after security threats in Mauritania cancelled the 2008 race, spent a decade in South America, then chose the Saudi dunes.
Q 17Al-Ahsa in eastern Saudi Arabia, a World Heritage Site since 2018, is the world's largest example of what?
Oasis
Oasis is the word for it: a huge underground aquifer waters more than 2.5 million palm trees at Al-Ahsa, allowing farming all year in what is otherwise sand desert.
Q 18Which sweet fruit of the palm tree has been cultivated in eastern Arabia for more than seven thousand years?
Dates
Dates were being grown in eastern Arabia by about 5300 BC. The Romans later planted the same palm in their gardens, though it would not fruit in Italy's cooler climate.
Q 19Which part of its face can the Arabian camel close at will, a trick that also helps it save water?
Nostrils
Nostrils that close at will cut the moisture lost with each breath, while a double row of eyelashes and bushy eyebrows keeps wind-blown sand out of the camel's eyes.
Q 20Wilfred Thesiger's 1940s crossings of the Rub' al Khali began as a hunt for the breeding grounds of which insect?
Locusts
Locusts were the excuse: an anti-locust unit paid Thesiger to look for the swarms' breeding grounds, and the journeys became his 1959 classic Arabian Sands.
Iron oxide, the compound in rust, coats the feldspar grains that make up a tenth or more of the sand, so the dunes glow in warm colours.
Q 24Which Jordanian desert valley, nicknamed the Valley of the Moon, stood in for Mars in the film The Martian?
Wadi Rum
Wadi Rum has played the red planet in several films, and its sandstone scenery in a 1962 desert epic is credited with kick-starting tourism in Jordan.
Q 25The nomadic herders of the Arabian Desert traditionally wove their black tents from the hair of which animal?
Goat
Goat hair made the black tent called a bayt al-shar, which cloth curtains divided into carpeted areas for the men, the family and the cooking.
Q 26Which slender sighthound, also called the gazelle hound, did the nomads of Arabia use to run down desert game?
Saluki
Saluki hounds hunt by sight rather than scent. To give one a flying start at a hare, a hunter might ride close on a camel and throw the dog towards its prey.
Q 27Ubar, the lost city sought beneath the dunes of southern Arabia, is called which legendary place 'of the Sands'?
Atlantis
Atlantis of the Sands is the lost city's popular name. In the 1990s searchers armed with satellite photographs claimed a ruined fort at Shisr in Oman as the site.
Q 28The houbara bustard, a shy bird of Arabia's deserts, is the traditional quarry of which hunting art?
Falconry
Falconry with saker and peregrine falcons came close to wiping out the houbara in the Middle East. A chased bustard spirals up into the air to dodge the strike.
Q 29The Rub' al Khali spreads across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and which fourth country?
Yemen
Yemen holds a strip along the southern edge of the sands, but by far the largest share of the desert lies in southeastern Saudi Arabia.
Q 30Umm al Samim, the 'Mother of Poisons' on the Rub' al Khali's eastern edge, is a treacherous expanse of what?
Quicksand
Quicksand hides there under a crust that looks solid: water draining off Oman's mountains collects in the closed basin and never reaches the sea.