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50 free Mummies trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Mummies are not only Egyptian. The oldest deliberately prepared ones come from the Chilean desert, the best-preserved lies in a Han tomb in China, a Copper Age man with 61 tattoos came out of an Alpine glacier, and Iron Age bodies keep surfacing from Danish bogs with the noose still on. Europe ground Egyptian mummies into medicine and paint for centuries, shipped 180,000 mummified cats to Britain as fertiliser, and unwrapped them at parties. These 50 questions cover the whole field: the Persian root of the word, natron and the 70 days, the brain through the nose, the heart left in place, the four canopic jars and the sons of Horus, Anubis, Herodotus, the Turin mummy that pushed embalming back 1,500 years, Howard Carter's 'wonderful things', the first mummy X-ray, Lord Carnarvon's mosquito, Ramesses II's military welcome in Paris, Ötzi, Tollund Man, Lindow Man, Lady Dai at Mawangdui, the Tarim mummies, the Children of Llullaillaco, Juanita, Guanajuato, Rosalia Lombardo, Lenin, mummy brown, mummia, 'Mummy' Pettigrew, mummy wasps and the Tenerife congress. Easy questions stick to Tutankhamun and Anubis; the hardest ask about Thutmose IV, Alfred Lucas and Nicolaus Rungius. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a Halloween or ancient history round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The English word 'mummy' ultimately comes from a Persian word for what?
Asphalt
Arabic mūmiya meant both an embalmed corpse and the bituminous embalming substance; the Persian root mūm means wax.
Q 02Roughly how many animal mummies have been found in Egypt?
Over one million
Many are cats; many more are sacred ibises, dated to roughly 450–250 BC.
Q 03In 1890, about 180,000 mummified cats were shipped from Egypt to England to be used as what?
Fertilizer
The Victorians treated mummies as raw material as often as relics.
Q 04The Chinchorro, makers of the oldest deliberately prepared mummies, lived in which modern country?
Chile
Their mummies come in black, red, mud-coated and bandaged styles; the oldest dates to around 5050 BC.
Q 05The Spirit Cave mummies, dated at more than 9,400 years old, were found in which US state?
Nevada
Their dating pushed the oldest deliberate mummification in the Americas well before the Chinchorro child.
Q 06Whose Histories give one of the most detailed ancient accounts of Egyptian mummification?
Herodotus
Book 2 describes the use of natron to dry the body and insists it stayed in the salt no more than 70 days.
Q 07Egyptian embalmers dried the body in which naturally occurring salt?
Natron
It was packed inside the body cavity and over the skin for about 70 days.
Q 08For how many days was the body left in the drying salt, in the classic Egyptian process?
70
Herodotus insists the body stayed in the salt no longer than that.
Q 09Which organ did Egyptian embalmers deliberately leave inside the body?
The heart
It was thought to be the seat of thought and feeling and would be weighed against a feather in the afterlife.
Q 10Through which opening did embalmers drain the brain after breaking it up with a rod?
The nose
Modern experiments found the organ came out far more easily once liquefied and left to drain by gravity.
Q 11The preserved organs were stored in how many canopic jars?
Four
By the Nineteenth Dynasty each lid bore one of the four sons of Horus as guardian of its organ.
Q 12Whose heads appear on the lids of later canopic jars?
The four sons of Horus
Each son guarded a particular organ; poorer families sometimes skipped the jars altogether.
Q 13Which jackal-headed Egyptian god was the patron of embalming?
Anubis
He also attended the Weighing of the Heart that decided whether a soul could enter the realm of the dead.
Tests in 2018 showed a mummy in which Italian city had been deliberately embalmed 5,600 years ago?
Q 21What was done to Ramesses II's mummy in Paris before it went home in 1977?
Irradiated against fungi
The claim that the pharaoh travelled on a passport is incorrect, though French 'passeport' paperwork may explain the legend.
Q 22In what year was Ötzi the Iceman found in the Ötztal Alps?
1991
He lies in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano; he was killed by an arrow to the left shoulder.
Q 23How many tattoos did Ötzi the Iceman have?
61
His hair also held high levels of copper and arsenic, hinting at metalworking.
Turin
The linen wrappings carried conifer resin and plant extracts, pushing artificial mummification back 1,500 years.
Q 15Who led the 1922 excavation that found Tutankhamun's tomb?
Howard Carter
His patron was George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon; the tomb is designated KV62.
Q 16Asked 'Can you see anything?' at the tomb door, what did Carter famously reply?
'Yes, wonderful things!'
His own journal records it as 'Yes, it is wonderful'; the tomb held more than 5,000 artifacts.
Q 17Which pharaoh's mummy received the first X-ray of a mummy, in 1903?
Thutmose IV
Grafton Elliot Smith and Howard Carter used the only X-ray machine in Cairo.
Q 18What modern technique lets researchers 'unwrap' mummies digitally without touching them?
CT scanning
The scans are detailed enough to reconstruct tiny linens in the nostrils; Tutankhamun had a digital autopsy this way.
Q 19How did Lord Carnarvon, the first 'curse' victim, actually die in 1923?
An infected mosquito bite
He slashed the bite while shaving; Marie Corelli had published a warning about 'dire punishment' two weeks before.
Q 20When Ramesses II's mummy flew to Paris in 1976, what was it greeted with at Le Bourget?
Full military honours
It was treated at the Musée de l'Homme for fungus; the story that it was issued a passport is a myth.
Q 24What evidence suggests Ötzi was murdered?
An arrowhead in his shoulder
He died somewhere between about 3350 and 3105 BC.
Q 25Tollund Man, the famous bog body found in 1950, was preserved in which country?
Denmark
He was found near Silkeborg in Jutland with a plaited hide noose around his neck; an autopsy found he was hanged.
Q 26What did a 1950 autopsy conclude about how Tollund Man died?
He was hanged
The noose of plaited animal hide was still around his neck.
Q 27Most bog bodies, including Tollund Man and Lindow Man, date to which period?
The Iron Age
They cluster in northwest Europe, where acidic, oxygen-poor peat tans the skin.
Q 28Lindow Man, jokingly nicknamed 'Pete Marsh', was found in a peat bog in which English county?
Cheshire
Commercial peat cutters found him in 1984; he is freeze-dried and on display at the British Museum.
Q 29Xin Zhui, 'Lady Dai', was found remarkably preserved at which Chinese site in 1971?
Mawangdui
Her Han-dynasty tomb at Changsha held 1,400 artifacts and her soft tissue was still pliable.
Q 30The Tarim mummies were discovered in the Tarim Basin of which region?
Xinjiang, China
Genetic studies found Western Steppe-related ancestry among them.