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60 free The Bronze Age trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Bronze Age trivia quiz covers the era, roughly 3300 to 1200 BC in the Near East, when humans first alloyed copper with tin and built the first cities, empires and writing systems. The easy questions handle the basics: what bronze is made of, which ages come before and after, the Danish museum curator who invented the three-age system, the first civilization to enter the period and the pharaoh who fought at Kadesh. From there it moves through the great Bronze Age worlds: Sumer and Akkad, the Old and New Kingdoms of Egypt, the Hittites, the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaeans of Greece, the Indus cities and Shang China's ritual bronzes and oracle bones. The harder half is for archaeology fans: the ten tons of oxhide copper ingots on the Uluburun wreck, the looters who dug up the Nebra sky disc, the Trundholm sun chariot, the Amesbury Archer's Swiss teeth, the Great Orme copper mine, the Yamnaya and the first chariots at Sintashta, the Sea Peoples on the walls of Medinet Habu, and the theories for why the whole system fell apart around 1200 BC. If you enjoyed our ancient Egypt, Sumer or Stone Age quizzes, this is the deep dive on the age of bronze. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the sites, cultures and artefacts named before publishing.
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Q 01Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper together with which other metal?
Tin
A typical mix is about 12% tin; alloying with zinc instead gives brass, which reached Britain only late in the first millennium BC.
Q 02In the three-age system, the Bronze Age sits between which two other ages?
The Stone Age and the Iron Age
A transitional Chalcolithic or 'copper-stone' age is often slotted in between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.
Q 03Which 19th-century Danish archaeologist put the three-age sequence on a scientific footing while classifying a museum collection?
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen
The idea of metal ages goes back to Lucretius in the first century BC; Lubbock later split the Stone Age into Palaeolithic and Neolithic.
Q 04By roughly what date had the Bronze Age begun across much of the Old World?
3000 BC
Different regions crossed the threshold at different times, so each has its own chronology.
Q 05Why did bronze remain rare and expensive in many areas throughout the period?
Tin occurs in relatively few places
Copper is very common, but the earliest tin was probably panned from river gravels like placer gold, and finished bronze was keenly recycled.
Q 06Which people of the North Caucasus produced the oldest known bronze, an arsenical alloy, as early as the mid-4th millennium BC?
The Maykop culture
True tin bronze needs cassiterite ore mined and smelted separately, then added to hot copper.
Q 07Why was iron, though far more abundant than copper, out of common use until the end of the 2nd millennium BC?
It needs a much higher smelting temperature
Iron smelts at about 1,250 °C, while Neolithic pottery kilns of 6000 BC could already reach the 1,085 °C needed for copper.
Q 08Which region was the first to enter the Bronze Age, with the rise of Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BC?
West Asia and the Near East
Its peoples invented the potter's wheel, written law codes and city-states, and laid the foundations of astronomy and mathematics.
Q 09Bronze Age cultures were the first to develop what?
Writing
Mesopotamia and Egypt had the earliest practical systems, and their arrival often marks a region's shift from prehistory to history.
Q 10Which continent's archaeology conventionally uses a five-period system with no Bronze Age at all?
The Americas
Some American cultures such as the Moche did smelt bronze independently, and the Inca used it for tools and sculpture.
Q 11In the Near East chronology, the Late Bronze Age is usually dated to which span?
1550–1200 BC
Its final phase, LBA II B, ends with the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Q 12The Hittites, whose kingdom was established in the 18th century BC, had their capital at which city in northern Anatolia?
Hattusa
After 1180 BC it broke into 'Neo-Hittite' city-states, some of which survived into the 8th century BC.
Q 13Which pharaoh fought Muwatalli II at Kadesh around 1274 BC, in the earliest pitched battle whose tactics are recorded in detail?
Ramesses II
His enemy was the Hittite king; the Egyptian chariot force alone probably numbered at least 2,000 vehicles.
Q 21In the Aegean Bronze Age trade network, tin and charcoal were imported to which island where copper was mined and alloyed?
Cyprus
One theory blames the Aegean collapse on the island's forests being exhausted by charcoal-making within 50 years.
Q 22The Late Bronze Age collapse struck the eastern Mediterranean at roughly what date?
Around 1200 BC
Palace economies from Greece to Anatolia fell apart, and Greece slid into the Dark Ages that lasted until about 800 BC.
Q 23Which great power spanning Anatolia and the Levant disintegrated entirely in the Late Bronze Age collapse?
The Hittite kingdom
Q 14The Egyptian-Hittite treaty of about 1259 BC, the oldest surviving peace treaty, was originally recorded on tablets of which metal?
Silver
Both sides' versions survive: hieroglyphs on temple walls at Karnak and the Ramesseum, and baked clay tablets from the Hittite capital.
Q 15The Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence of 14th-century BC Egypt, are unusual because they are written in which script?
Cuneiform
Most are in a Canaanite-flavoured Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, on clay tablets.
Q 16The later New Kingdom of Egypt is called the Ramesside period after how many pharaohs who took that throne name?
Eleven
The Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties ran from 1292 to 1069 BC, at the peak of Egyptian power.
Q 17The Minoan civilization, often called the first in Europe, was centred on which island?
Crete
Its palace at Knossos coordinated a trade network, and its own scripts are still undeciphered.
Q 18The Mycenaean Greeks adapted a Minoan script into which system, the first record of the Greek language?
Linear B
They borrowed the idea around 1600 BC and used it in their palaces for administration and accounts.
Q 19Which archaeologist found the gold 'Mask of Agamemnon' at Mycenae in 1876?
Heinrich Schliemann
He believed he had found the Trojan War king; the mask is actually 300 to 400 years older than any plausible date for the war.
Q 20The volcanic eruption of Thera around 1600 BC, sometimes blamed for weakening the Minoans, took place on which island known today by another name?
Santorini
Speculation includes a tsunami that wrecked Cretan cities or the Cretan navy in its home harbour.
Assyria and Egypt survived in weakened form, while the Phoenicians gained autonomy from the waning great powers.
Q 24The 'Sea Peoples' hypothesised as raiders at the end of the Bronze Age were first proposed from reliefs at which mortuary temple of a Twentieth Dynasty pharaoh?
Medinet Habu
Louvre curator Emmanuel de Rougé coined the concept in 1855; today they are seen more as a symptom of the collapse than its cause.
Q 25Which German historian first dated the great collapse to 1200 BC, in an 1817 history of Greece?
Arnold Heeren
He worked from a traditional dating of the fall of Troy to 1190 BC.
Q 26The Uluburun shipwreck, a late-14th-century BC merchant vessel, was found off the coast of which modern country?
Turkey
A sponge diver spotted 'metal biscuits with ears' in 1982; excavation took 22,413 dives over eleven seasons.
Q 27How much raw copper, in the form of 354 'oxhide' ingots, was the Uluburun ship carrying?
Ten tons
It also held about 175 glass ingots, the earliest intact ones known, and a scarab bearing Nefertiti's name.
Q 28The Nebra sky disc, the oldest known concrete depiction of the cosmos, was found in 1999 in which country?
Germany
Two illegal metal-detectorists dug it up on the Mittelberg hill and sold it for 31,000 marks; police recovered it in a Basel sting in 2002.
Q 29The cluster of seven gold stars on the Nebra sky disc is generally interpreted as which star group?
The Pleiades
Two arcs on the sides are thought to mark the angle between the solstices, and a lower arc may be a solar boat.
Q 30The Nebra sky disc is attributed to which Early Bronze Age people of Central Europe?
The Únětice culture
That culture's rich Leubingen burial, stuffed with gold grave gifts, points to a stratified society by 2000 BC.