Yemen Trivia
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47 free Yemen trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Yemen trivia quiz covers the ancient and the modern: the Sabaean kingdom of biblical Sheba and its Great Dam at Marib, the Himyarites, the coffee monopoly exported through Mocha, the Ottoman and British partitions, and the two Yemens that finally merged in 1990. It also covers the crisis years — Ali Abdullah Saleh's fall, the Houthi takeover, the Saudi-led intervention and the famine and cholera that followed. Along the way you'll meet Yemen's landmarks and culture: the tower houses of Sanaa's Old City, the mud skyscrapers of Shibam, the dragon's blood trees of Socotra, Arabia's highest peak, the jambiya dagger, khat and saltah, and the strait called the Gate of Grief. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the constitutional capital and largest city of Yemen?
Sanaa
Sanaa was overrun by Houthi rebels in September 2014, so the internationally recognised government now sits in a southern port that it declared its temporary capital.
Q 02Which two countries share a land border with Yemen?
Saudi Arabia and Oman
Saudi Arabia and Oman are the only two: the Saudi frontier is more than four times the length of the Omani one, and its line was not finally agreed until a treaty signed in 2000.
Q 03Which biblical queen do Yemenis and Arabic lore call Bilqis?
Queen of Sheba
Queen of Sheba is the title the Bible and the Quran give her without a name, so later storytellers supplied one: Bilqis in Arabic lore and Makeda in Ethiopia's national saga, the Kebra Nagast.
Q 04The Sabaeans' Great Dam, an ancient engineering marvel, stood near which city, their capital?
Marib
Marib's dam watered the Sabaean capital for more than a thousand years; a flood from one of its breaches is recalled in the Quran, and tradition says the disaster scattered whole tribes across Arabia.
Q 05Which Judaism-influenced kingdom succeeded Saba around AD 275 and unified most of Yemen?
Himyarite
Himyarite rulers adopted Judaism in the late fourth century, and under one of the last of them, Dhu Nuwas, the Christian kingdom of Aksum invaded from Ethiopia in 525 and took control.
Q 06Through which Red Sea port did Yemen ship its coffee to Europe in the 17th century?
Mocha
Mocha lent its name to the coffee it shipped, and Yemen stayed Europe's main supplier until the Dutch began growing their own on Java at the end of the 1600s.
Q 07The earliest reports of coffee drinking come from the mid-15th century among which group in Yemen?
Sufi mystics
Sufi mystics in Yemen's monasteries were drinking coffee by the mid-1400s to stay awake for night devotions, and the habit reached Mecca and Cairo within a century.
Q 08South Yemen, independent from 1967, held what distinction in the Middle East?
The region's only communist state
The region's only communist state tied itself to the Soviet bloc after a 1969 coup, and it merged with the north in 1990 just as that bloc was falling apart.
Q 09Which city was the capital of South Yemen before the 1990 union with the north?
Aden
Aden lost its capital status at unification, and when southern leaders tried to break away again in 1994 the short civil war ended once northern troops took the city that July.
Q 10Who was the first president of unified Yemen, in power until the Arab Spring forced him out in 2012?
Ali Abdullah Saleh
Ali Abdullah Saleh had already led North Yemen since 1978 and stayed on top for 33 years in all, a balancing act he likened to 'dancing on the heads of snakes'.
Q 11How did Yemen's long-time strongman, ousted in 2012, die in December 2017?
Killed by his erstwhile Houthi allies
Killed by his erstwhile Houthi allies: two days after he publicly broke with them and offered talks with their enemies, Houthi fighters killed him.
Q 12The Houthi movement, which seized the capital in 2014, follows which branch of Islam?
Zaydi Shia
Zaydi Shia: the Houthis, formally Ansar Allah, emerged in the late twentieth century from a revivalist movement among Yemen's Zaydi community, whose imams had ruled parts of the country on and off for a millennium.
Q 13Which country launched 'Operation Decisive Storm' against the Houthis in March 2015?
Saudi Arabia
Q 21Why can farmers terrace and crop Yemen's western highlands, unlike most of Arabia?
Summer monsoon rains
Summer monsoon rains reach the highlands because the mountains, which rise above 3,600 metres at Jabal an-Nabi Shu'ayb, Arabia's highest peak, catch moist air that never gets to the desert beyond.
Q 22What is the Tihamah?
The hot, flat Red Sea coastal plain
The hot, flat Red Sea coastal plain: the Tihamah runs along Yemen's west coast from the northern frontier to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, with humid heat, lagoons and wadis that mostly dry out before reaching the sea.
Q 23Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait between Yemen and Djibouti, has an Arabic name meaning what?
Saudi Arabia began airstrikes on 26 March 2015 at the head of a mostly Arab coalition, after President Hadi fled abroad; the Houthis were accused of receiving Iranian support.
Q 14Which three colours, in horizontal bands, make up Yemen's national flag?
Red, white and black
Red, white and black: adopted at unification, the plain tricolour uses the pan-Arab colours of Egypt, Syria and Iraq but carries no stars, eagle or inscription.
Q 15Which disease swept war-torn Yemen from 2016 in one of the largest outbreaks ever recorded?
Cholera
Cholera spread as the war wrecked water and sanitation and left health workers unpaid, producing some 2.5 million suspected cases and about 4,000 deaths.
Q 16Which Yemeni island, closer to Africa than Arabia, has about a third of its plant species found nowhere else?
Socotra
Socotra broke away from the mainland long ago, and that isolation is why 37% of its plants, 90% of its reptiles and 95% of its land snails live nowhere else.
Q 17The umbrella-shaped dragon's blood tree of Yemen's islands is named for what?
Its dark red resin
Its dark red resin, known as dragon's blood, was highly prized in the ancient world as a dye and a medicine, and islanders still use it to colour wool and glue pottery.
Q 18The walled town of Shibam in eastern Yemen is famous for what?
Tower blocks built of mudbrick
Tower blocks built of mudbrick, each many storeys high, were packed inside one wall for defence, earning Shibam the nickname 'Manhattan of the Desert'.
Q 19What did workers repairing the Great Mosque in Yemen's capital find hidden in its attic in 1972?
Early Quran manuscripts
Early Quran manuscripts: not realising what they had, the workers stuffed the old parchments into potato sacks and left them on a minaret staircase; one is among the oldest Qurans known.
Q 20Zabid, a former capital and centre of Islamic learning, was placed on which UNESCO list in 2000?
World Heritage in Danger
World Heritage in Danger: UNESCO moved Zabid to the danger list in 2000, seven years after inscribing it, because so many of its historic houses had given way to concrete buildings.
Gate of Grief
Gate of Grief, also rendered 'Gate of Tears', is said to recall the dangers ships once faced there; an Arab legend instead blames an earthquake that drowned many as Arabia split from Africa.
Q 24Which stimulant leaf do Yemenis chew at long afternoon social gatherings?
Khat
Khat is so popular that the thirsty crop takes a large share of Yemen's scarce irrigation water, much of it pumped from deep wells.
Q 25In Yemen, what is a jambiya?
A curved dagger worn at the belt
A curved dagger worn at the belt, the jambiya can carry a prized hilt of rhinoceros horn, and Yemeni demand for those hilts drove much of the rhino poaching of the 1970s and 1980s.
Q 26Saltah, Yemen's national dish, is a meat stew topped with a froth made from which spice?
Fenugreek
Fenugreek seeds are ground, mixed with water and whisked until they swell into a light froth, which is spooned onto the stew while it is still bubbling.
Q 27What is Yemen's most popular sport?
Football
Football kept its hold through the war: most of the national squad had to flee by boat to Djibouti in 2015, yet four years later Yemen played its first Asian Cup as a unified country.
Q 28What is the currency of Yemen?
Rial
Rial notes are no longer one currency in practice: the Houthis refuse banknotes printed by the rival government since 2017, so the rial trades at very different rates on each side of the front line.
Q 29What was Operation Magic Carpet?
The airlift of Yemenite Jews to Israel
The airlift of Yemenite Jews to Israel carried nearly 49,000 people in 1949 and 1950; its official name, On Wings of Eagles, came from a biblical image of being carried to safety.
Q 30Which vast sand desert covers Yemen's far north-east and much of southern Arabia beyond it?
The Empty Quarter
The Empty Quarter translates its Arabic name, Rub' al Khali: the sand sea goes so long without rain that almost nobody lives in its 650,000 square kilometres.