The Suez Canal Trivia
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48 free The Suez Canal trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Suez Canal trivia quiz covers the 193-kilometre cut through the Isthmus of Suez, from the pharaohs who dug the first Nile-to-Red-Sea channel to the container ship that wedged itself sideways in 2021. The easy questions ask which two seas it links, which country it runs through, which continents it divides, which Frenchman built it and which president nationalised it. From there it moves through the ancient precursors, the ten-year construction, the lavish opening, the British share purchase and the 1956 crisis that ended a prime minister's career. The hard end is for people who know their Port Said from their Port Tewfik: the survey error that made Napoleon give up, the empress whose yacht led the opening convoy, the opera commissioned for the celebrations, the statue meant for the entrance that ended up in New York, the eight-year closure and the fleet trapped inside it, the fish invasion named after de Lesseps and the exact days the Ever Given blocked world trade. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Suez Canal Company, the Suez Crisis, the Yellow Fleet, the 2021 obstruction, the Ever Given, Aida, the Great Bitter Lake and the Convention of Constantinople before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Panama Canal, Egypt and famous ships quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Before the Suez Canal opened, ships sailing from Europe to India had to round which cape?
Cape of Good Hope
Cape of Good Hope voyages around Africa were the only sea route to Asia until 1869, and ships too large for the canal still have to go that way.
Q 02The Suez Canal forms the border between which two continents?
Africa and Asia
Africa and Asia meet at the canal, so Egypt, with territory on both banks, is a country that sits on two continents.
Q 03By the mid-1950s, about two-thirds of Europe's supply of which commodity was shipped through the Suez Canal?
Oil
Oil made the canal Europe's lifeline, one reason Britain and France went to war to win it back after Egypt took it over in 1956.
Q 04The Suez Canal opened in 1869, six months after which other feat that shrank the globe?
The transcontinental railroad
The transcontinental railroad was finished across the United States in May 1869, so together the two let travellers circle the world in record time.
Q 05Which Egyptian president nationalised the canal in July 1956, triggering the Suez Crisis?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the takeover in a speech in Alexandria and promised the company's shareholders compensation at the previous day's Paris stock exchange price.
Q 06The Suez Canal's closures in 1956 and 1967 pushed shipowners to build which giant vessels for the long way round?
Supertankers
Supertankers made the detour pay: once ships no longer had to fit the canal, owners built them many times larger, and the biggest still cannot use it.
Q 07Unusually for a ship canal, the Suez Canal has no what?
Locks
Locks are not needed because the canal is cut at sea level through flat desert, so seawater runs freely from end to end and ships sail straight through.
Q 08Which city stands at the Suez Canal's northern entrance on the Mediterranean?
Port Said
Port Said did not exist before the canal: it was founded in 1859 on the spot where the digging began.
Q 09Which Persian king set up granite stelae boasting that he had dug a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea?
Darius I
Darius I's inscriptions claim that ships then sailed from Egypt through the canal to Persia, though some later ancient writers say he left the work unfinished.
Q 10Which Greek historian wrote that Pharaoh Necho abandoned his canal after an oracle warned it would only help foreigners?
Herodotus
Herodotus adds that 120,000 Egyptians died on the dig, and that Necho then gave it up for war, building fleets of triremes on both seas instead.
Q 11Which French ruler dropped his Suez canal plan after surveyors wrongly put the Red Sea far above the Mediterranean?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte's engineers measured the isthmus during his Egyptian campaign and got it badly wrong; a survey in the 1840s found the two seas almost level, clearing the way for the canal.
Q 12Which Italian city, its spice trade undercut by Portugal's sea route to India, considered digging a Suez canal centuries early?
Venice
Venice even opened talks with Egypt's Mamluk rulers, but the plan died when Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt in 1517.
Q 13The Suez Canal's French builder won his concession from which ruler of Egypt, a friend from his days as a young diplomat?
Sa'id Pasha
Q 21Egypt seized the Suez Canal in 1956 to pay for which project after the United States and Britain withdrew their funding?
The Aswan High Dam
The Aswan High Dam was to be paid for out of canal tolls, Egypt's leader said; in the end the Soviet Union helped build it after the West pulled out.
Q 22Which British prime minister resigned in January 1957, his career wrecked by the Suez Crisis?
Anthony Eden
Anthony Eden had colluded in the invasion and denied it to Parliament; pushed into a humiliating retreat by American pressure, he resigned on 9 January 1957, citing ill health.
Q 23The Suez Crisis turned to war when which country invaded Egypt on 29 October 1956, secretly in league with Britain and France?
Israel
Sa'id Pasha granted a 99-year lease running from the canal's opening, so it was due to pass to Egypt in 1968 anyway, 12 years after Egypt seized it.
Q 14Which British prime minister fought the Suez Canal project for years, fearing it would undermine Britain's dominance of world shipping?
Lord Palmerston
Lord Palmerston traded public insults with the canal's builder, while Britain backed a rival railway across Egypt from Alexandria to Suez, built by Robert Stephenson.
Q 15Which empress led the Suez Canal's opening procession aboard her yacht in November 1869?
Eugénie
Eugénie represented France, whose emperor had backed the project, and her yacht L'Aigle led dozens of ships into the canal.
Q 16Which Verdi opera was commissioned by Egypt's khedive and premiered in Cairo in 1871, two years after the Suez Canal opened?
Aida
Aida reached the stage months late because its sets and costumes were trapped in Paris during the Prussian siege of 1870-71.
Q 17A sculptor's unbuilt lighthouse colossus for the Suez Canal's entrance became the forerunner of which monument?
The Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty grew out of Bartholdi's plan for a robed Egyptian peasant woman holding a torch, which he pitched for the canal in the 1860s and kept reworking until New York got it in 1886.
Q 18Which British prime minister snapped up Egypt's 44% stake in the Suez Canal in 1875?
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli borrowed the £4 million privately to close the deal, so Britain, which had fought the canal's construction, became its largest single shareholder.
Q 19Which banker lent the British government £4 million at short notice to buy Egypt's Suez Canal shares in 1875?
Lionel de Rothschild
Lionel de Rothschild advanced the money for a commission, taking the risk that Parliament might later refuse to ratify the purchase.
Q 20The 1888 treaty guaranteeing every ship passage through the Suez Canal in war and peace was signed in which city?
Constantinople
Constantinople was the capital of the empire that still formally ruled Egypt; Britain, occupying Egypt since 1882, attached a reservation that kept the treaty from taking full effect until 1904.
Israel struck first by secret arrangement, giving Britain and France a pretext to land troops, supposedly to separate the two sides, and retake the canal.
Q 24Egypt closed the Suez Canal at the start of which war in June 1967, keeping it shut for eight years?
The Six-Day War
The Six-Day War left enemy troops dug in on the east bank, turning the canal into a front line that did not reopen to shipping until June 1975.
Q 25The fifteen cargo ships trapped in the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975 were nicknamed what?
The Yellow Fleet
The Yellow Fleet was named for the desert sand that caked the ships' decks; when the canal reopened, only two of them could still sail away under their own power.
Q 26Crews stranded in the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975 made their own version of what?
Postage stamps
Postage stamps, now collectors' items, were one invention of the crews, who formed their own floating community with sports contests and social events to pass the years.
Q 27Which container ship ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week in March 2021?
Ever Given
Ever Given ran aground on 23 March 2021 and lay wedged across the channel until 29 March, leaving hundreds of ships queuing at either end.
Q 28High tides freed the ship stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021 before salvors had to resort to what?
Unloading its cargo
Unloading its cargo, some 18,000 containers, was the feared next step and could have taken weeks; high tides let the tugs pull the hull free first.
Q 29The ship that blocked the Suez Canal in 2021 belonged to an owner in which country?
Japan
Japan: the owner had only chartered the ship out to a Taiwanese line, so Egypt's compensation claim landed on the Japanese firm and its insurers.
Q 30Which Egyptian president launched the 'New Suez Canal' expansion in 2014 and opened it a year later?
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ordered the dig finished within a single year, and the new channel duly opened in August 2015.