Syria Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
58 free Syria trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Syria holds some of the oldest cities on Earth and the world's earliest alphabet, and this quiz runs the whole length of its story: Ebla and Ugarit, the Battle of Kadesh, Zenobia's rebellion at Palmyra, Paul on the road to Damascus, the Umayyad caliphs, Saladin and the Crusader castles, Tamerlane, four centuries of Ottoman rule, Sykes-Picot and the French Mandate, independence in 1946, the union with Egypt, the Ba'ath coup and 53 years of Assad rule that ended in December 2024. Easy questions ask for the capital, the neighbours, the sea and the religion of the majority; the harder ones want the meaning of the flag's three red stars, the mountain that is the highest point, the village that still speaks Aramaic, the drug that became the country's biggest export, the year of the Hama massacre and Syria's only Olympic gold medallist. There is also the Umayyad Mosque, the Aleppo souk, Aleppo soap, kibbeh and arak, Damascus steel, the Golan Heights and the Kurds of the north-east. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its cities and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which popular pet rodent has a common species named after Syria, its wild home?
Hamster
Hamster owners often keep the golden, or Syrian, species, native to the dry country around Aleppo; a small group caught there in 1930 was bred in captivity, and its descendants spread to homes and laboratories worldwide.
Q 02Syria's coastline lies on which sea?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean washes Syria's short coast, where Latakia and Tartus are the main ports; on Arwad island, off Tartus, the Crusaders clung to their last foothold in the Levant until the Mamluks took it in 1302.
Q 03Which country borders Syria to the north?
Turkey
Turkey sent troops across the border in August 2016 and held parts of northern Syria for years, while millions of Syrians fled the other way as refugees during the civil war.
Q 04Which rebel group led the lightning offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad in December 2024?
Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham
Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham fighters broke out of their north-western stronghold on 27 November 2024 and took Damascus on 8 December, ending more than half a century of Assad family rule.
Q 05Who became Syria's transitional president in January 2025?
Ahmed al-Sharaa
Ahmed al-Sharaa, long known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million US bounty on his head until December 2024; weeks after Washington dropped it, he was named transitional president.
Q 06Hafez al-Assad overthrew his own party's leadership in November 1970 in a coup known as what?
The Corrective Movement
The Corrective Movement was the name Hafez al-Assad gave his November 1970 coup, which ousted Salah Jadid; he ruled until his death in 2000, when his son Bashar succeeded him.
Q 07The Ba'ath Party, which seized power in Syria in 1963, also ruled which other Arab country for decades?
Iraq
Iraq was ruled from 1968 to 2003 by a rival wing of the Ba'ath, Saddam Hussein's; far from uniting the neighbours, the shared party left the two regimes bitter foes for decades.
Q 08From 1958 to 1961 Syria merged with which country to form the United Arab Republic?
Egypt
Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser ran the union and dissolved Syria's political parties; resentment at Egyptian domination led army officers to seize power in Damascus in September 1961 and pull Syria out.
Q 09Which European power held the League of Nations mandate over Syria between the world wars?
France
France was assigned the mandate at the San Remo conference in 1920; that July its troops enforced it by crushing Faisal's short-lived Arab kingdom at the Battle of Maysalun.
Q 10The 1916 secret deal carving the Ottoman Middle East into British and French zones is named after which two diplomats?
Sykes and Picot
Sykes and Picot, Britain's Mark Sykes and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, struck the deal in secret; it came to light in November 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power and published it.
Q 11In which script did the scribes of Ugarit write their 14th-century BC tablets?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform signs, pressed into clay with a stylus, were adapted at Ugarit into a 30-letter alphabet; the city near modern Latakia was destroyed around 1190 BC in the Bronze Age collapse.
Q 12Archaeologists digging at Tell Mardikh, south of Aleppo, in the 1970s unearthed the tablet archive of which Bronze Age kingdom?
Ebla
Ebla's royal palace was destroyed by fire in the 23rd century BC; its archive of clay tablets, found in 1974-75, revealed a previously unknown Semitic language, now called Eblaite.
Q 13Which 3rd-century queen of Palmyra ruled an empire stretching from Egypt into Asia Minor before Rome defeated her?
Zenobia
Q 21Under Ottoman rule from 1516, Damascus was the starting point of a great yearly caravan to which city?
Mecca
Mecca was the goal of the hajj caravan that gathered in Damascus each year; the pilgrim traffic made the city a major entrepot and won it more attention from the sultans than its size warranted.
Q 22After Assad's fall, Syria's new flag replaced the old one's two green stars with what?
Three red stars
Three red stars sit on the green, white and black 'independence flag' first used in 1932, which the opposition revived during the civil war; the stars first stood for the districts of Aleppo, Damascus and Deir ez-Zor.
Q 23What is Syria's highest point?
Mount Hermon
Zenobia's armies took Egypt and pushed as far as Ancyra before Rome defeated her in 272; most accounts say she was then paraded in a triumph in Rome, though one has her dying on the way there.
Q 14Emesa, the Syrian home city of the Roman empress Julia Domna, is known today by which name?
Homs
Homs was Roman Emesa, where Julia Domna's family served as priests of the sun god Elagabal; her great-nephew, the emperor Elagabalus, later had the god's black stone carried to Rome.
Q 15According to the New Testament, which apostle was converted on the road to Damascus?
Paul
Paul, then Saul of Tarsus, was blinded by a light on the way to arrest Damascus Christians (Acts 9) and regained his sight after Ananias laid hands on him in the city.
Q 16The Great Mosque of Damascus is traditionally held to contain the head of which biblical figure?
John the Baptist
A shrine inside the prayer hall is said to hold the head of John the Baptist; the caliph al-Walid, who reigned from 705 to 715, built the mosque on the site of a church dedicated to him.
Q 17Which caliphate made Damascus its capital in the mid-7th century?
The Umayyad
The Umayyad caliphs ruled from Damascus after Muawiya took power in 661, governing from Spain to the Indus; the Abbasids overthrew them in 750 and the capital later moved to Baghdad.
Q 18Krak des Chevaliers was held until 1271 by which crusading order, later rulers of Rhodes and Malta?
The Knights Hospitaller
The Knights Hospitaller were given the castle in the 1140s and rebuilt it; the Mamluk sultan Baibars took it in 1271, reportedly using a forged letter from their Grand Master ordering surrender.
Q 19Which founder of the Ayyubid dynasty took Damascus in 1174 and ruled Syria until his death there in 1193?
Saladin
Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, letting its Christians buy their freedom instead of repeating the Crusaders' massacre of 1099; he is buried in the old city of Damascus.
Q 20Which conqueror sacked Aleppo and Damascus around 1400 and deported the artisans of Damascus to Samarkand?
Tamerlane
Tamerlane (Timur) besieged Damascus over the winter of 1400-01; the historian Ibn Khaldun, caught inside, was lowered over the wall by ropes to negotiate with him before the city was sacked.
Mount Hermon, known locally as Jabal al-Shaykh, rises to 2,814 metres at the southern end of Syria's western mountain border; its snowmelt feeds the springs of the River Jordan.
Q 24Which basalt plateau in south-west Syria has Israel occupied since the Six-Day War?
The Golan Heights
The Golan Heights, about two-thirds of which Israel captured in under 48 hours of fighting, were placed under Israeli law in 1981, and the United States recognised the annexation in 2019.
Q 25Which river, Syria's most important, crosses the east of the country on its way to Iraq?
The Euphrates
The Euphrates flows south-east past Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor; the Tabqa Dam, completed upstream of Raqqa in 1973, backed the river up into the largest lake in the country.
Q 26The villagers of Maaloula, north-east of Damascus, kept which ancient language alive into the 21st century?
Aramaic
Aramaic lived on in Maaloula as Western Neo-Aramaic, shared with two nearby villages; one of them, Bakh'a, was wrecked in the civil war and its people scattered, leaving only Maaloula and Jubb'adin.
Q 27The Assad family belongs to which religious minority that came to dominate the army?
Alawite
Alawites were for centuries a poor and repressed mountain minority; the armed forces, which recruited heavily among minorities under the mandate, became their way up, and by the 1960s Alawite officers held key commands.
Q 28Who make up Syria's second-largest ethnic group, about a tenth of the population, living mostly along the northern border?
Kurds
Kurds were long treated as outsiders: a 1962 census in the north-east stripped some 120,000 of them of citizenship, leaving those families stateless for decades.
Q 29Which community grew in Syria as refugees fled the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire?
Armenians
Armenians were driven on deportation marches into the Syrian desert in 1915-16; survivors and later refugees settled above all in Aleppo, long home to most of the community.
Q 30In February 1982 the Ba'athist regime crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising with a massacre in which city?
Hama
Hama was shelled and stormed for most of February 1982 by forces including Rifaat al-Assad's Defence Companies; estimates of the dead run as high as 40,000, and whole neighbourhoods were flattened.