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World History Trivia Questions for Kids and Families
Pharaohs, explorers, inventors and ancient wonders: thirty world history trivia questions with answers, from easy to hard, for the whole family.
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Easy world history trivia questions for kids
1.What were the kings of ancient Egypt called?
Pharaohs. Tutankhamun became pharaoh when he was only about eight or nine years old.
2.Which explorer reached the Americas in 1492?
Christopher Columbus. He was sailing for the king and queen of Spain.
3.Which famous wall stretches for thousands of miles across northern China?
The Great Wall of China. Some early sections were made of rammed earth: soil, clay and rocks packed down hard.
4.Which country invented paper, according to most historians?
China. An official named Cai Lun is credited with improving papermaking around the year 105.
5.What do we call a body that the ancient Egyptians preserved and wrapped in linen?
A mummy. Before wrapping, the body was dried out with a natural salt called natron.
6.Which ancient people held the first Olympic Games?
The ancient Greeks. The games were held every four years at Olympia, traditionally starting in 776 BC.
7.What do we call the long early period when people made their tools mostly from stone?
The Stone Age. The oldest known stone tools were made at least 2.6 million years ago.
8.What do we call the deep ditch, often filled with water, dug around a castle?
A moat. A drawbridge over the moat could be raised with chains to keep attackers out.
9.What ancient device tells the time using the shadow cast by the Sun?
A sundial. One of the oldest known Egyptian sundials, found in the Valley of the Kings, is more than 3,200 years old.
10.In Roman numerals, what number does the letter X stand for?
10. The ancient Romans had no numeral for zero.
11.What do we call a long cold period when huge ice sheets and glaciers spread across much of Earth?
An ice age. The last big cold stretch ended about 11,700 years ago, when today's warmer Holocene epoch began.
12.Which board game with kings, knights and pawns grew from a game first played in India more than 1,300 years ago?
Chess. Its Indian ancestor, chaturanga, was named for four parts of an army.
Medium world history trivia questions
13.In which ancient Greek city did democracy begin, around 500 BC?
Athens. The word democracy comes from Greek words meaning 'people' and 'rule'.
14.Which Roman wall was built across northern Britain?
Hadrian's Wall. It stretched about 73 miles (117 kilometers) from coast to coast.
15.Which wealthy banking family held great power in Renaissance Florence and paid artists to create famous works?
The Medici family. Besides bankers and art lovers, the Medici family also produced politicians, cardinals and even popes.
16.What are the giant stone statues on Easter Island called?
Moai. Islanders carved and set up some 900 of them across the island.
17.The ancient Maya lived mainly in which part of the world?
Mexico and Central America. The Maya built stone pyramids and had their own writing system.
18.What did the ancient Romans call the long channels and bridges they built to carry water into their cities?
Aqueducts. They moved water using only gravity, along a gentle downhill slope.
19.Ancient Egyptians wrote on sheets made from a wetland plant. What was this writing material called?
Papyrus. The English word 'paper' comes from 'papyrus'.
20.The huge temple of Angkor Wat, built in the 1100s, is in which Asian country?
Cambodia. Angkor Wat appears on Cambodia's national flag.
21.Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
Marie Curie. She named the element polonium after her home country, Poland.
22.Which Norse explorer is thought to be the first European to reach North America, around the year 1000?
Leif Erikson (Leif Eriksson). His father, Erik the Red, started the first European settlement in Greenland.
Hard world history trivia questions for adults
23.Who led the first expedition to reach the South Pole?
Roald Amundsen. His Norwegian team got there in 1911, using dog sleds.
24.What is the name of the ancient writing made of wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets in Mesopotamia?
Cuneiform. It is one of the earliest known writing systems, first used for the Sumerian language.
25.What did the ancient Romans call the town they built where London stands today?
Londinium. The Romans founded it around AD 47 to 50, soon after they arrived in Britain.
26.In 1940, four teenagers in southwestern France found a cave full of ancient animal paintings. What is the cave called?
Lascaux. Its paintings are at least 17,000 years old, and horses are the animals painted most often.
27.Which woman ruled ancient Egypt as pharaoh for about 20 years, around 3,500 years ago?
Hatshepsut. She sent traders to the faraway Land of Punt, and they brought back 31 live incense trees.
28.What were the knotted strings the Inca used to keep records called?
Quipu (or khipu). The position of each knot showed ones, tens or hundreds, much like the way we write numbers.
29.Which southern African country takes its name from a great medieval city built of stone?
Zimbabwe. The city's huge stone walls were built without any mortar to hold the stones together.
30.Which English scientist invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989?
Tim Berners-Lee. In 1990 he wrote the first web browser, which he called WorldWideWeb.
Ways to use these world history questions
Read three questions at dinner, one easy, one medium and one hard, and let everyone guess which event happened earliest before you share the answers. Teachers can open a history class with a question that matches the day's unit, such as mummies and papyrus for Egypt or aqueducts and Londinium for Rome, then point to it on a timeline. Before a museum visit, choose the questions that match the galleries you will see and turn them into a scavenger hunt. For game night, write each answer on a card and challenge players to put the cards in order from oldest to newest.
Play World History trivia together
Room Trivia has a whole world history category with different questions: four answers to pick from, points for speed, and a scoreboard. Put it on a TV or laptop and everyone answers on their own phone. Free, with no app and no account.