Egyptian Mythology Trivia
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96 free Egyptian Mythology trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Egyptian Mythology trivia questions with answers. Falcon heads, jackal heads, a hippo-lion-crocodile who eats the hearts of the unworthy. This quiz covers the gods and myths of ancient Egypt: the Heliopolitan Ennead from Atum down to Osiris and Set, the Osiris myth and Isis's search for the pieces, the eighty-year contest between Horus and Set, Ra's nightly voyage through the Duat and his fight with the serpent Apep, the weighing of the heart from the Book of the Dead, and the animal-headed gods from Anubis and Thoth to Bastet, Sobek and Taweret. Fifty questions run from beginner to Egyptologist. The easy questions ask which god has a jackal's head and what Ra is the god of; the hard ones want the city where Osiris's coffin washed ashore, the frog-and-serpent-headed Ogdoad of Hermopolis, which organ each of the four sons of Horus guarded, and the beer trick that stopped Sekhmet's massacre. It suits students, mythology fans and anyone who has stood in front of a papyrus in a museum and wondered who is who. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual gods, myths and texts, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01Ra, one of the most important gods by the Fifth Dynasty, was primarily the god of what?
The Sun
Ra was the sun god, thought to sail across the sky each day in a solar barque and through the underworld each night.
Q 02Which god of funerary rites and embalming is usually shown as a man with a canine head?
Anubis
Anubis was lord of the dead in Egypt's earliest dynasties until Osiris displaced him; he stayed on as the embalmer and the guide who led souls to judgement.
Q 03Which bird's head does Horus, god of kingship and the sky, most often wear?
A falcon
A falcon: Horus appears as the bird or as a falcon-headed man, and every living pharaoh was held to be Horus on earth, becoming Osiris only at death.
Q 04Which god of writing, wisdom and the Moon is depicted with the head of an ibis or a baboon?
Thoth
Thoth was matched by the Greeks with Hermes, and his title 'thrice great' became Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary author of the Hermetic texts.
Q 05Which body part did Horus lose in his fight with Set, later restored as a famous protective amulet?
His eye
His eye was torn out by Set and then healed, becoming the wedjat, the 'whole' eye; Egyptians wore it as one of their commonest amulets from the Old Kingdom to Roman times.
Q 06Set was the Egyptian god of deserts, storms and what else?
Disorder and violence
Disorder and violence were Set's domain, and he murdered his brother Osiris; yet he was no simple villain, standing on Ra's boat each night to fight off the serpent of chaos.
Q 07In Plutarch's telling of the Osiris myth, which part of the dismembered god did Isis fail to recover?
His genitalia
His genitalia: Plutarch says Set threw the organ into the Nile, where fish ate it, so Isis fashioned a replica; in Egyptian accounts she recovers the whole body.
Q 08In Plutarch's telling, the chest holding Osiris's body drifts out to sea and washes up at which city?
Byblos
Byblos: a tree grew around the chest there, and the local king had the trunk cut into a pillar for his palace with Osiris still inside, until Isis came and asked for it.
Q 09Horus and Set spent eighty years before a court of gods contending for what?
The throne of Egypt
The throne of Egypt: Horus won contest after contest, yet the case dragged on because the presiding god kept siding with Set, until the court at last declared Horus king.
Q 10What is the Ennead?
Nine deities worshipped at Heliopolis
Nine deities worshipped at Heliopolis formed the Great Ennead, a family running from the creator down to Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys; other towns had enneads of their own, and not all of them held exactly nine gods.
Q 11Which primordial god created himself and then fathered Shu and Tefnut, the first divine couple?
Atum
Atum emerged from the primeval waters to engender himself and then the gods; as the setting sun he was pictured as an old man who had to be renewed every night.
Q 12Which goddess is shown as a star-covered woman arching over the earth, swallowing the sun each evening?
Nut
Nut swallowed the sun at dusk and gave birth to it at dawn; in Plutarch's telling she was forbidden to bear children on any day of the year, so five extra days were won from the moon for her.
Q 13Which Egyptian earth god is usually shown lying beneath the arched body of the sky goddess?
Geb
Geb was counted among the first divine rulers of Egypt, and the pharaohs claimed descent from him; he is sometimes shown with a goose on his head, the sign that writes his name.
Q 21What was the Egyptian name for the underworld realm the dead passed through?
The Duat
The Duat was dangerous enough that coffins were painted with guides to it: the Book of Two Ways, about 4,000 years old, is the earliest known Egyptian map of the underworld.
Q 22What did the ancient Egyptians actually call the text we know as the Book of the Dead?
Spells of Coming Forth by Day
Spells of Coming Forth by Day was the Egyptian title; 'Book of the Dead' dates only from 1842, when the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius published a papyrus as the 'Todtenbuch'.
Q 23In the Weighing of the Heart, a dead person's heart was set on the scales against what?
A feather
Q 14Which god of air holds the sky goddess aloft, keeping her apart from the earth god below?
Shu
Shu stands between his two children with arms raised; the Egyptians said he had to part the pair, who were locked in an embrace, before there was room for the world between them.
Q 15Tefnut's name may imitate the sound of which act that brought her into being?
Spitting
Spitting: in the Coffin Texts the creator sneezes out her twin Shu and spits out Tefnut, and late texts even wrote her name with the sign of a spitting mouth.
Q 16The Ogdoad were eight primordial deities worshipped at which city?
Hermopolis
Hermopolis was called Khemenu, 'Eight-Town', after the Ogdoad; its Greek name honors Hermes, and the old one survives in the modern village of el-Ashmunein.
Q 17Ptah, the chief god of Memphis, brought the world into being by what means?
The creative power of speech
The creative power of speech: the Shabaka Stone says Ptah conceived the world in his heart and spoke it with his tongue; the slab was apparently later reused as a millstone, wearing away part of the text.
Q 18Which god fashioned human bodies from clay on a potter's wheel and placed them in their mothers' wombs?
Khnum
Khnum was also lord of the Nile's first cataract at Elephantine: an inscription nearby tells of a seven-year famine, and of a king who sought the flood's return by honoring the god's temple.
Q 19Which giant serpent, the enemy of Ra, embodied chaos and darkness?
Apep
Apep, called Apophis by the Greeks, attacked the sun god's boat every night; priests fought back with a yearly rite in which they spat on, trampled and burned an effigy of him.
Q 20Ra travelled by night through the underworld in which form?
As a ram
As a ram-headed god: the Egyptian word for ram sounded like ba, 'soul', a likely pun that showed the night sun as a soul travelling to rejoin its body.
A feather, the emblem of Maat, goddess of truth: a heart heavy with wrongdoing was fed to the monster Ammit, while a light one won its owner a place in the afterlife.
Q 24Ammit, who devoured hearts that failed the judgement, combined the parts of which three animals?
Lion, hippopotamus and crocodile
Lion, hippopotamus and crocodile: Ammit had the crocodile's head, the lion's forequarters and the hippopotamus's hindquarters, the three largest man-eaters the Egyptians knew, and was feared but never worshipped.
Q 25Maat's ideological opposite, meaning injustice, chaos and violence, was called what?
Isfet
Isfet had to be fought: order was held to have replaced it at creation, and each new king took on the sun god's role of setting Maat in its place again.
Q 26Which organ did the baboon-headed Hapy, one of the four sons of Horus, guard?
The lungs
Baboon-headed Hapy guarded the lungs; Imsety (human) had the liver, Duamutef (jackal) the stomach and Qebehsenuef (falcon) the intestines.
Q 27In the myth of humanity's near-destruction, Ra halted the rampaging Sekhmet by dyeing what red to look like blood?
Beer
Beer, dyed with red ochre and poured out like a lake, fooled the goddess: she drank it as blood, fell into a stupor and forgot the slaughter, and Egyptians marked the escape with a yearly festival of drunkenness.
Q 28Which goddess, best known in the form of a cat, was first worshipped as a fierce lioness?
Bastet
Bastet began as a lioness goddess of Bubastis and softened into a cat in later centuries; when her temple there was excavated, more than 300,000 mummified cats were found.
Q 29Which goddess of writing and measurement was shown with a seven-pointed emblem above her head?
Seshat
Seshat helped the king 'stretch the cord' to lay out a new temple, and is shown notching a palm rib to count the years of his reign.
Q 30Hathor, goddess of music, love and motherhood, was usually shown as or with the horns of which animal?
A cow
A cow: Hathor appears as a cow or as a woman crowned with cow horns and a sun disk, a headdress Isis later took over; in late times Egyptian women hoped to become Hathor in the next world, as men hoped to become Osiris.