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50 free Nile River trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Nile is the longest river on Earth, and almost everything about it surprises. It flows north, its longest branch is not its biggest, its water mostly comes from Ethiopian rain, its present course is only about 15,000 years old, and it once carved a gorge 2,400 metres deep beneath modern Cairo when the Mediterranean dried up. This quiz covers the geography (sources, tributaries, the Sudd, the six cataracts, Lake Nasser, the shrinking delta), the hydrology (why the Blue Nile floods, how much the Sudd evaporates, what a nilometer measures) and the wildlife, from crocodiles and hippos to the invasive perch that wiped out 500 cichlid species. It also follows the river through history: the flood calendar of the pharaohs, the Kushite black pharaohs of Napata and Meroe, Herodotus and the Mountains of the Moon, Pedro Páez at Gish Abay, John Hanning Speke at Lake Victoria, the Aswan dams and the rescue of Abu Simbel, and today's fight over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Culture gets a look-in too, with Verdi's Aida, Bernini's fountain and Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the Nile, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Ancient Egypt and Egyptian mythology quizzes next, or our rivers quiz for the world's other great waterways.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Into which sea does the Nile empty?
The Mediterranean
It reaches the sea near Alexandria after forming a large delta north of Cairo.
Q 02How long is the Nile, according to the 2009 satellite measurement of its longest watercourse?
7,088 km
That makes it the longest river in the world, though it carries far less water than the Amazon or Congo.
Q 03In which direction does the Nile flow?
North
It rises in the African Great Lakes region and runs to the Mediterranean, which confused early Europeans used to rivers running the other way.
Q 04The Nile's two major tributaries are named for which two colours?
White and blue
The White Nile is longer, but the Blue Nile brings more than twice as much water.
Q 05The two great branches of the Nile meet at which capital city?
Khartoum
The two streams are visibly different colours where they join, one pale with quartz sediment and one dark with Ethiopian clay.
Q 06The Blue Nile begins near which lake?
Tana
It rises as a stream called the Abay near the town of Gish Abay in Ethiopia.
Q 07For roughly how long has the Nile followed its present course?
About 15,000 years
Geologically it is a young river, assembled from older systems by rift uplift and tilting lake plateaus.
Q 08How many countries lie wholly or partly within the Nile Basin?
Eleven
South Sudan became the eleventh when it gained independence in 2011.
Q 09The Nile's most distant source, a Rukarara tributary, is in which country's Nyungwe National Park?
Rwanda
It sits at 2,539 metres and feeds the Kagera River, which drains into Lake Victoria.
Q 10Which pair of waterfalls at the Nile's exit from Lake Victoria were submerged by the Nalubaale dam?
Ripon and Owen
The river first takes the name 'Nile' at that outlet, and the stretch to Lake Albert is called the Victoria Nile.
Q 11What is the vast South Sudan swamp where the Nile loses about half its water to evaporation called?
The Sudd
The ground there slopes just 1 in 13,000, and papyrus and invasive water hyacinth choke the channels.
Q 12Which tributary joins the White Nile at Lake No from the west?
Bahr el Ghazal
Its name means 'gazelle river'; despite an 860,000 sq km basin it adds little water to the Nile.
Q 13Roughly what share of the main Nile's annual flow comes from the Blue Nile?
54%
The White Nile supplies 32% and the Atbarah 14%; during summer floods the Blue Nile's share rises to about 70%.
Q 21The three seasons of the ancient Egyptian calendar were Akhet, Peret and Shemu; what did Akhet mean?
Inundation
Peret was the growing season and Shemu the rainless harvest; the whole calendar followed the flood.
Q 22Which two plants represented Lower and Upper Egypt respectively?
Papyrus and sedge
Lower Egypt was the delta and Upper Egypt the valley from Giza to the first cataract.
Q 23The world's earliest known major dam, the Sadd el-Kafara, was built by the Egyptians around which date?
2600 BCE
It was an attempt to control flooding; Egyptians then built no successful dams on the Nile until the 19th century.
Q 14The Nile's discharge is roughly what fraction of the Amazon's?
About 1%
Its flow of about 87 cubic km a year is also just 6% of the Congo's and 12% of the Yangtze's.
Q 15What share of the Nile's sediment comes from the Blue Nile and Atbarah, both rising in Ethiopia?
97%
The soil of the Nile Delta essentially began as rock in the Ethiopian Highlands.
Q 16How many cataracts interrupt the Nile between Sudan's capital and Aswan?
Six
The sixth and furthest upstream is at Sabaloka near Khartoum; the first, at Aswan, is now submerged behind the dams.
Q 17Lake Nasser, formed by the Aswan High Dam, ranks where among human-made lakes?
Second largest in the world
It drowns more than 480 km of the river's course.
Q 18The Nile Delta splits into which two main distributary branches?
Rosetta and Damietta
The delta covers about 22,000 sq km and has been shrinking since the High Dam began trapping its sediment in 1970.
Q 19Which ancient river gauges have measured the height of the Nile for thousands of years?
Nilometers
An ideal flood was a rise of about 6 metres; the Roda Island gauge was used from at least 622 CE until 1921.
Q 20The ancient Egyptians called their country 'kmt', meaning 'black', in reference to what?
The dark colour of the flood silt
The same Egyptian word, jtrw, was used for both 'Nile' and 'river'.
Q 24The Kushite 'Black Pharaohs' who conquered much of Egypt ruled from which two Nile cities?
Napata and Meroë
The Kushite Empire arose around 780 BCE along the Nile and Atbarah in what is now Sudan.
Q 25Which Egyptian god was responsible for the annual flood?
Hapy
Egyptians believed the floodwaters rose out of the netherworld at Elephantine Island, home of the ram god Khnum.
Q 26Why were many ancient Egyptian burial sites placed on the west bank of the Nile?
To be nearer the setting sun
Sunset stood for death in a cosmology built on the daily cycle of Ra and the yearly cycle of the flood.
Q 27The legendary Mountains of the Moon described by Ptolemy are associated with which range?
Rwenzori
The Nile's highest sources lie on their slopes in Uganda.
Q 28Which Greek historian visited Egypt in 457 BCE and puzzled over floods that came in the rainless summer?
Herodotus
He travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan.
Q 29Which Jesuit missionary reached the source of the Blue Nile at Gish Abay in the early 17th century?
Pedro Páez
James Bruce later publicised his writings; the White Nile's source was not settled for another 260 years.
Q 30Which European first saw Lake Victoria in 1858 and declared it the source of the White Nile?
John Hanning Speke
He never followed the outflow to Sudan, which left room for doubters.