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60 free Sumer trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Sumer trivia quiz covers the earliest known civilization, the city-states of southern Mesopotamia that gave the world writing, the wheel, the first codified laws and the first named author. The easy questions handle the basics: which modern country it sits in, the two rivers, what cuneiform was written on, the hero of the oldest surviving epic and the temple towers we call ziggurats. From there it moves through the city-states themselves, Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Kish and Nippur, and the rulers who fought over them, from Eannatum and his Stele of the Vultures to Sargon of Akkad and Ur-Nammu. The harder half is for history buffs and students of the ancient Near East: what the Sumerians called their own land, the sexagesimal number system, the salt that slowly killed their fields, the Lyres of Ur, Queen Puabi's death pit, Leonard Woolley's excavations, the Gutian dark age and the century in which spoken Sumerian finally faded. If you have played our ancient history or Egypt quizzes, this is the deep dive on the civilization that came first. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Sumer, its major cities, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sargon of Akkad and Enheduanna before publishing.
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Q 01Sumer, the earliest known civilization, lay in the south of which modern country?
Iraq
Its city-states sat on the alluvial plain south of what is now Baghdad, in provinces such as Dhi Qar and Al-Muthanna.
Q 02Sumerian farmers lived along the valleys of which two rivers?
Tigris and Euphrates
Grain surpluses from the river valleys are what let the Sumerians build the world's first urban settlements.
Q 03What was the Sumerian writing system called?
Cuneiform
Hundreds of thousands of texts survive, from receipts to hymns, partly because scribes in training copied them again and again.
Q 04What material did Sumerian scribes write on?
Moist clay
Because clay tablets survive fire and burial far better than paper, whole libraries of Sumerian texts have been recovered.
Q 05Which poem, discovered in the ruins of Uruk, is considered the earliest surviving example of fictional literature?
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Its hero, called Bilgamesh in Sumerian, is a king of Uruk who may have been a real ruler of the Early Dynastic period.
Q 06What name is given to the large layered temple platforms that are the most famous Sumerian buildings?
Ziggurats
They grew out of the habit of rebuilding temples on ever-higher terraces above the flood plain.
Q 07Which Sumerian city is estimated to have been the first in the world to pass 50,000 inhabitants?
Uruk
During the Uruk period the city was probably ruled by a priest-king and its towns were still unwalled.
Q 08Which Sumerian city is traditionally regarded, on the basis of the Sumerian King List, as the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia?
Eridu
Eridu lay only 24 kilometres from Ur, and its god Enki was believed to live in the Abzu, the freshwater aquifer beneath the earth.
Q 09What was the Sumerian word for a king, literally meaning 'great man'?
Lugal
The rise of the lugal marked a shift from temple councils led by priests to more secular rule in the Early Dynastic period.
Q 10What did the Sumerians call their own land in their inscriptions?
Kengir
The name means 'Country of the noble lords'; the familiar 'Sumer' is actually the Akkadian name for them.
Q 11The word 'Sumer' comes from the name for the Sumerians used by which people who later conquered them?
Akkadians
Sumerian and Akkadian coexisted as spoken languages for about a thousand years before Akkadian won out.
Q 12Linguists generally classify Sumerian as which of the following?
A language isolate
Many attempts to link it to other families have failed; it is agglutinative, building words by gluing units of meaning together.
Q 13Which scholar was the first to publish the word 'Sumer', in a lecture in January 1869?
Jules Oppert
The Sumerians were completely unknown to early modern archaeology, which was focused on the Assyrians and Babylonians.
Q 21In the Sumerian afterlife, the dead were confined to the gloomy world of which goddess?
Ereshkigal
Her realm was guarded by gateways with monsters, and the dead spent eternity as a gidim, or ghost.
Q 22The Sumerian counting system, later adopted throughout Babylonia, alternated ten with which other number?
Six
The resulting sexagesimal system is why we still have 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle.
Q 23From roughly which date onwards did the Sumerians write multiplication tables on clay tablets?
c. 2600 BC
They were also the first to use a place-value numeral system and to find the area of a triangle.
Q 14The first major excavation of a Sumerian city took place in 1877 at Girsu under which French archaeologist?
Ernest de Sarzec
Girsu (modern Tello) belonged to the state of Lagash, whose dynasty is missing from the Sumerian King List despite being richly documented.
Q 15Which Sumerian city replaced Eridu at an early stage as the primary temple city whose priests held sway over the other city-states?
Nippur
It was the seat of Enlil, chief god of the pantheon, and kept its religious primacy for the whole Sumerian period.
Q 16Which storm god was the chief of the Sumerian pantheon?
Enlil
He ruled storm, wind and rain, and his consort Ninlil was goddess of the south wind.
Q 17Inanna, goddess of love and war worshipped at Uruk, was the deification of which heavenly body?
Venus
She was honoured as both the morning and the evening star, and kings may have re-enacted her marriage to Dumuzid with priestesses.
Q 18Which Sumerian city was the cult centre of the moon god Sin (Nanna)?
Ur
Its Great Ziggurat, dedicated to the moon god, was later restored by the last king of Babylon.
Q 19According to Sumerian belief, from what material had the gods created human beings?
Clay
Humans were made specifically to serve the gods, and citizens owed the temple a labour duty they could buy out with silver.
Q 20What shape did the Sumerians believe the Earth to be?
A rectangular field with four corners
Their known world stretched from the Upper Sea (Mediterranean) to the Lower Sea (Persian Gulf) and on to Meluhha and Magan.
Q 24Which set of laws, the oldest such codification yet discovered, dates to the Ur III period?
Code of Ur-Nammu
Beneath the king, everyone was either a free person (lu) or a slave (arad for men, geme for women).
Q 25Which drink, brewed from cereals, made the Sumerians one of the first known societies to enjoy it?
Beer
In the oldest surviving epic, Enkidu drinks seven jugs of it and becomes expansive and sings with joy.
Q 26By the Ur III period, Sumerian farmers had switched from wheat to which more salt-tolerant crop as their principal cereal?
Barley
Rising soil salinity from irrigation slowly wrecked yields, and the population fell by nearly three-fifths between 2100 and 1700 BC.
Q 27What device, also used in Egypt, did the Sumerians employ to lift water for irrigation?
Shaduf
Canals needed constant repair and desilting, and the government drafted people to work on them in a corvée.
Q 28The Lyres of Ur, thought to be the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments, were discovered by which archaeologist?
Leonard Woolley
They came out of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, excavated between 1922 and 1934 for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.
Q 29Which queen was buried in the Ur royal cemetery accompanied in death by her servants?
Puabi
Resin found in her tomb appears to have been traded from as far away as Mozambique.
Q 30Roughly how many bodies were found in Ur's so-called Great Death Pit, PG-1237?
74
Sixty-eight of them were women, and CT scans later showed they died from blows to the head, not the willing poison Woolley imagined.