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60 free Cairo trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Cairo is a thousand years old but stands beside pyramids four and a half thousand years older, and this quiz covers both. It starts with Memphis and Heliopolis, the Roman fortress of Babylon and the tent-city of Fustat, then follows the Fatimid founders of 969, Ibn Tulun's mosque, Saladin's Citadel and wall, the Mamluk slave-soldiers, Selim I stripping the marble, Muhammad Ali's rise, Khedive Ismail's Paris on the Nile, Black Saturday, Nasser and Tahrir. The landmarks come next: the Alabaster Mosque, Al-Azhar and its park, Khan el-Khalili, the Nilometer, the Fatimid gates, the Egyptian Museum's 170,000 objects, the Grand Egyptian Museum's Tutankhamun hall, the Sphinx, the Cairo Tower and its lotus lattice, Zamalek, Coptic Cairo and the Ben Ezra Synagogue. There are questions on the metro, the airport, Al Ahly and Zamalek, the Zabbaleen and the New Administrative Capital. Easy questions ask which country Cairo leads and what 'Tahrir' means; hard ones want the vizier who burned Fustat, the length of Saladin's wall and the CIA money behind the tower. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its sites, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Ancient Egypt and Pyramids quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly how many people live in the Greater Cairo metropolitan area?
22 million
The city proper alone holds more than 9.8 million; the agglomeration is the largest in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East.
Q 02Cairo's Arabic name, al-Qāhirah, means what?
The Vanquisher
The Fatimid caliph al-Mu'izz gave the name; one story says the planet Mars, 'the Conquering Star', was rising when the city was founded.
Q 03Egyptians often refer to Cairo by which name, which is also the Egyptian Arabic word for Egypt itself?
Maṣr
The habit underlines how completely the capital stands for the country in everyday speech.
Q 04Cairo was founded in 969 by which dynasty as its new capital?
The Fatimids
General Jawhar al-Saqili laid out the walled palace-city northeast of the older settlement; it took four years to build.
Q 05Which earlier settlement, founded in 641 beside the Roman Babylon Fortress, was Cairo's predecessor?
Fustat
Its name means 'the tent'; it was burned in 1168 to keep it out of Crusader hands, and Cairo took over as the economic centre.
Q 06Cairo is nicknamed 'the city of a thousand' what?
Minarets
The nickname reflects its dense Islamic architecture; the historic centre became a World Heritage Site in 1979.
Q 07Which Muslim commander conquered Byzantine Egypt in 639–642 and founded Africa's oldest mosque?
Amr ibn al-As
He also founded a mosque beside the fortress that, though much rebuilt, is the oldest in Egypt.
Q 08What did the Nilometer on Roda Island, Cairo's oldest Islamic-era structure, measure?
The Nile's water level
It was ordered by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil and still stands, though it has been re-roofed over the centuries.
Q 09Which mosque, built between 876 and 879, is the oldest in Cairo to keep its original form?
Ibn Tulun
It is a rare example of classical Abbasid architecture and the only survivor of the razed city of al-Qata'i.
Q 10Al-Azhar University, founded in 970, is described as which of the following?
One of the world's oldest universities
Students originally studied the Qur'an, law, logic, grammar and how to calculate the moon's phases; non-religious subjects were added in 1961.
Q 11Which ruler began building the Cairo Citadel in 1176?
Saladin
It stayed the seat of Egypt's government for nearly 700 years, until the ruler moved to Abdeen Palace in 1874.
Q 12The great mosque of Cairo's Citadel, built 1832–57, is nicknamed after which stone covering its walls?
Alabaster
The viceroy who commissioned it chose an Ottoman and European style quite unlike traditional Cairene mosques.
Q 13Which Ottoman sultan conquered Egypt in 1517 and shipped the marble of Cairo's medieval monuments to Istanbul?
Selim I
Cairo became the empire's second city after Constantinople; the Black Death had struck it more than fifty times between 1348 and 1517.
Q 21The Grand Egyptian Museum, fully opened in November 2025, holds the complete 5,398-piece collection of which pharaoh?
Tutankhamun
It is billed as the largest museum in the world devoted to a single civilisation, designed by the Irish firm Heneghan Peng.
Q 22The Giza pyramid complex lies roughly how far southwest of central Cairo?
13 km
Its three great pyramids and the Sphinx were built in the Fourth Dynasty, around 2600–2500 BC, at the edge of the Western Desert.
Q 23Egyptologists generally agree that the head of the Great Sphinx depicts which pharaoh?
Khafre
The Sphinx sits on the east side of the complex, beside the second-largest of the three pyramids.
Q 14The Mamluks who ruled Cairo from 1250 to 1517 were originally what?
Soldiers purchased as young slaves
Succession passed violently from one mamluk to another, yet the sultanate repelled the Mongols and made Cairo one of the largest cities in the world by 1340.
Q 15By 1340 Cairo, with close to 500,000 people, was the largest city west of where?
China
When Napoleon arrived in 1798 the population had fallen forty percent below that medieval peak, to under 300,000.
Q 16Which Albanian-born officer became viceroy of Egypt in 1805 after the French withdrawal?
Muhammad Ali Pasha
His grandson later remodelled downtown Cairo on Paris, with maidans and wide avenues.
Q 17Which 19th-century ruler commissioned Cairo's 'Paris on the Nile' downtown and named the square now called Tahrir?
Khedive Ismail
Financial troubles meant only part of the plan was built; the square became known as Tahrir after the 1919 revolution and was renamed after 1952.
Q 18What does 'Tahrir', the name of Cairo's famous central square, mean?
Liberation
Established in 1867, it was the focus of the 1919 revolution and the 2011 protests that ended Hosni Mubarak's presidency.
Q 19The 1952 riots that destroyed nearly 700 shops, cinemas, casinos and hotels in Cairo are known as what?
Black Saturday
The British left Cairo after the revolution later that year, but the city's growth showed no sign of slowing.
Q 20Cairo's Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square holds over how many items?
170,000
French architect Marcel Dourgnon designed the building, and Auguste Mariette's tomb was moved into its garden at his own wish.
Q 24The Cairo Tower on Gezira Island stands 187 metres, making it how much taller than the Great Pyramid?
44 m
Documents suggest it was funded with money the CIA had given Nasser as a bribe; a revolving restaurant crowns it.
Q 25The Cairo Tower's open lattice-work design was meant to evoke which ancient Egyptian plant?
Lotus
Built 1956–61, it was Africa's tallest structure for a single year before South Africa's Sentech Tower overtook it.
Q 26Which upscale neighbourhood occupies the northern part of Gezira Island in the Nile?
Zamalek
The Baehler Company developed it in 1905–07; the island itself only formed at the turn of the 14th century when the river's flow dropped.
Q 27Khan el-Khalili, the famous bazaar in the historic centre, takes its name from what kind of building?
A caravanserai
The name once meant a single building; today it covers the whole shopping district beside the Al-Hussein Mosque.
Q 28The Cairo Metro, opened in 1987, holds what distinction?
Oldest in Africa
Line 1 ran 29 km from Helwan into the city centre; the system now carries more than a billion riders a year.
Q 29Cairo's two great football clubs, CAF's clubs of the century, are Al Ahly and which other?
Zamalek
Their derby is one of Egypt's most-watched sporting events, played at Cairo International Stadium.
Q 30Which regional organisation has its headquarters in Cairo?
The Arab League
Its building stands on Tahrir Square, alongside the Egyptian Museum and the American University's downtown campus.