Iran Trivia
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117 free Iran trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Iran was Persia until 1935, home to one of the oldest continuous civilisations on Earth, the empire of Cyrus and Darius, the poets Ferdowsi, Hafez and Rumi, and a spring new year older than Islam. It also produces most of the world's saffron and caviar, has Asia's highest volcano and the hottest ground temperature ever measured, and has spent the decades since 1979 at the centre of world news. This Iran trivia quiz covers all of it. Fifty-seven questions run from geography (Tehran, Damavand, the Caspian, the Lut and Kavir deserts, Isfahan) through ancient history (the Medes, the Achaemenids, Persepolis, the Cyrus Cylinder, the Sasanians), the Safavids and Qajars, Reza Shah, Mosaddegh and the 1953 coup, the revolution, the hostage crisis and the Iran–Iraq War, to culture (Nowruz, Zoroastrianism, the Shahnameh, Persian carpets), food (saffron, pistachios, caviar), science (Mirzakhani, the gas laser) and sport and film (wrestling, the Asian Cup, Kiarostami, Farhadi). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know the region. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do Iranians usually call their own official language?
Farsi
Farsi takes its name from the southern province of Fars, once called Pars; Arabic has no 'p' sound, so Pars became Fars and its language Farsi.
Q 02The name Iran is usually translated as what?
Land of the Aryans
Land of the Aryans is the usual gloss, from arya, the ancient Iranians' word for themselves; in 1935 the government asked other countries to use Iran in place of the older Western name.
Q 03Who founded the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BC?
Cyrus the Great
Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BC by rising against his overlord, then conquered Lydia and Babylon; his son Cambyses II added Egypt.
Q 04The Cyrus Cylinder, discovered in the ruins of Babylon in 1879, is held by which institution?
British Museum
The British Museum's Cyrus Cylinder is a clay foundation text in which Cyrus, having taken Babylon in 539 BC, boasts of restoring temples and sending exiles and their gods home.
Q 05Which ancient city was the capital of Elam and later a capital of the Achaemenid kings?
Susa
Susa is where French archaeologists dug up the Code of Hammurabi in 1901; an Elamite king had carried the stele off from Babylonia as war plunder some 3,000 years earlier.
Q 06Which Greek historian wrote that neither snow, rain, heat nor night stopped the Persian king's couriers?
Herodotus
Herodotus was praising the relay riders who carried royal messages along the Royal Road; his line is carved on New York's main post office and is often taken for the US Postal Service motto.
Q 07Persepolis, the ceremonial Achaemenid capital, was captured and burned in 330 BC by whose army?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BC; ancient writers either call it revenge for Xerxes' burning of Athens or blame a drunken feast egged on by the courtesan Thaïs.
Q 08Which empire, founded by Ardashir I in AD 224, was the last to rule Iran before the Arab conquest?
Sasanian
The Sasanian Empire began when Ardashir I killed the last Parthian king in battle; its kings became Rome's great rivals and in AD 260 captured the emperor Valerian alive.
Q 09Which 16th-century dynasty re-unified Iran and made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion?
Safavid
The Safavid founder Shah Ismail I was about 14 when he took Tabriz in 1501 and imposed Shia Islam on a population that was then mostly Sunni.
Q 10Who seized Iran's throne in 1925 and founded the Pahlavi dynasty?
Reza Shah
Reza Shah, a soldier who rose through the Cossack Brigade, deposed Ahmad Shah in 1925; in 1941 invading British and Soviet forces made him abdicate in favour of his son.
Q 11Which Iranian prime minister's oil nationalisation led to the Anglo-American coup of 1953?
Mohammad Mosaddegh
Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951; after the 1953 coup he was tried for treason, jailed for three years, then kept under house arrest until his death in 1967.
Q 12Who was Iran's first supreme leader after the 1979 revolution?
Ruhollah Khomeini
Ruhollah Khomeini flew home on 1 February 1979 after 14 years in exile, two weeks after the shah had left Iran; the constitution adopted that December made him supreme leader for life.
Q 13For how many days were 52 American hostages held after the November 1979 embassy seizure?
444
Q 21As of 2025, Iran ranked 17th in the world by both area and what other measure?
Population
Population: Iran's roughly 90 million people live mostly in the north and west, because vast dry deserts leave much of the centre and east almost empty.
Q 22Which city is Iran's second most populous?
Mashhad
Mashhad grew up around the tomb of Reza, the eighth Shia imam, who died there in 818; his shrine now draws millions of pilgrims a year.
Q 23Which currency replaced the qiran as Iran's official unit in 1932?
Rial
The rial replaced the qiran at par in 1932; it was nominally divided into 100 dinars, and Iranians have long quoted prices colloquially in tomans of 10 rials.
The 52 hostages were held for 444 days, from 4 November 1979 to 20 January 1981; Iran let them go only minutes after Ronald Reagan had been sworn in to replace Jimmy Carter.
Q 14Which Arab leader ordered the September 1980 invasion of Iran that began an eight-year war?
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein's government scrapped a 1975 border treaty over the Shatt al-Arab waterway five days before invading; the war ended in a 1988 ceasefire with the frontier unchanged.
Q 15Which sea lies along Iran's northern border?
Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea is often counted as the world's largest lake, a salty basin with no outlet to the ocean; its sturgeon made Iran one of the great producers of caviar.
Q 16Which dormant volcano northeast of the capital is the highest mountain in Iran?
Mount Damavand
Mount Damavand, about 5,600 m high, is often called Asia's highest volcano; in Persian legend the tyrant Zahhak lies chained inside it until the end of the world.
Q 17Which mountain range rises directly north of Iran's capital and holds the country's highest peaks?
Alborz
The Alborz form a wall between the humid northern coast and the dry plateau: their seaward slopes catch the rain and are thick with forest, while the side facing the capital is arid.
Q 18Which Iranian desert did NASA satellites find to have Earth's hottest land surface, 70.7 °C in 2005?
Dasht-e Lut
The Dasht-e Lut topped NASA's survey in five of seven years; its dark, dry, rocky ground soaks up sunlight and gets far hotter than any air temperature ever recorded.
Q 19Which strait at the mouth of the Persian Gulf separates Iran from Oman?
Strait of Hormuz
The Strait of Hormuz carried about a fifth of the world's oil in 2024; Iran had long threatened to close it, and did blockade it during the 2026 war.
Q 20Into how many provinces is Iran divided?
31
Iran has 31 provinces (ostan); the creation of Alborz province out of Tehran province in 2010 brought the total to 31, and the provinces are grouped into five administrative regions.
Q 24Which Arabic phrase is written 22 times in white script along the stripes of Iran's flag?
Allahu Akbar
Allahu Akbar runs 11 times along the green stripe and 11 along the red; the flag adopted in 1980 also swapped the royal emblem for a tulip-shaped rendering of the word Allah.
Q 25Nowruz, the Iranian new year, is timed to which astronomical event?
The spring equinox
The spring equinox starts Nowruz at its exact astronomical moment, whatever the hour; families mark it around a haft-sin table laid with seven symbolic items that begin with the letter S.
Q 26Zoroastrians worship which supreme, uncreated deity?
Ahura Mazda
Ahura Mazda is the god Darius the Great credits with making him king in the Behistun inscription, carved into a cliff about 100 metres above the ground.
Q 27The Shahnameh, the Persian national epic of some 50,000 couplets, was written by which poet?
Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi spent 33 years on the Shahnameh, finishing in 1010; he largely avoided Arabic loanwords, and a number of scholars credit the epic with helping the Persian language endure.
Q 28The 14th-century lyric poet Hafez, whose Divan sits in many Iranian homes, came from which city?
Shiraz
Hafez was born and is buried in Shiraz; Iranians still open his Divan at random to read their fortune in the poem they land on, especially at Nowruz and on Yalda night.
Q 29The Persian-language poet Rumi settled and is buried in which Anatolian city, home of the whirling dervishes?
Konya
Konya, then in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, is where Rumi died in 1273; his followers founded the Mevlevi order there, whose whirling sema ceremony is still performed.
Q 30Naqsh-e Jahan Square, laid out under Shah Abbas I between 1598 and 1629, is at the heart of which city?
Isfahan
Isfahan's great square doubled as a polo ground: the shah and his court watched matches from the upper galleries of the Ali Qapu palace overlooking it.