All About Ancient Egypt Trivia Quiz

Answer: Nile

The Nile is the world's longest river. It flows throughout the entire length of Egypt. The ancient Egyptians were so dependent on this river that Egypt is sometimes called "the gift of the Nile." Each year the Nile would flood and deposit rich soil along its banks. If it did not flood, people could not grow enough food and sometimes did not have enough to eat.

Answer: Hatshepsut was a woman

The Egyptians considered their pharaoh to be a living god. They were so in awe of him that they did not even call him by his name or titles. Pharaoh comes from two Egyptian words that mean "great house," because the pharaoh lived in a palace.

Hatshepsut was not the first woman pharaoh, and she was not the last, but she was one of the most famous. When her husband, Thutmose II, died, Hatshepsut's half-brother, Thutmose III, should have become pharaoh, but he was still a young boy. Hatshepsut decided to proclaim herself pharaoh. Since the Egyptians were used to being ruled by men, Hatshepsut would often dress like a man, and even wore a false beard!

Hatshepsut enjoyed a long and peaceful reign, and built many beautiful temples and monuments. After she died, however, her statues were destroyed and her name erased from many monuments. It is still not known for certain when or why this happened. It might have been because she was not regarded as a rightful ruler, or it might have been just because the Egyptians did not want to remember that they had once been ruled by a female pharaoh.

Answer: The Great Pyramid

Khufu began building his tomb, or pyramid, around 2550 BC (nobody knows the exact date). It was the biggest structure anyone had ever built. The Great Pyramid contains over 2,300,000 limestone blocks, and each block weighs over two tons. It was originally 481 feet (146.5 meters) high, and was the tallest structure on earth for over 3,800 years.

It is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Other pharaohs built pyramids as well, but none was as large or grand as the Great Pyramid.

Answer: Cheese

The ancient Egyptians did not enjoy many of the foods we take for granted today. For example, they could not have eaten chocolate, French fries, or spaghetti because Egyptians did not know about these foods. They did, however, eat many things that are familiar to us, such as bread, cheese, onions, and fish.

Answer: The Rosetta Stone

For a long time, no one could read Egyptian writing. Then a large stone was found that had an inscription in both Greek and hieroglyphs. It was called the Rosetta Stone because it was found near a village called Rosetta. A man named Jean-François Champollion used the Rosetta Stone's inscriptions to make the first translation of ancient Egyptian writing. Today the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum in London.

Hieroglyphs are written in the form of pictures. Some stand for entire words, and others stand for sounds, like the letters of our alphabet. One strange thing about hieroglyphs is that until very late in Egyptian history, only the consonants were written, so scientists have to guess what the vowels were. Hieroglyphs were last used for writing around 400 AD.

Answer: Yes

Egypt is mentioned many times in the Bible. The most famous story about Egypt in the Bible is in Exodus. The Egyptians were a strong military power and conquered many smaller countries, including Israel. The Bible tells us that the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, and forced them to work building their cities, until Moses freed them and led them out of Egypt. No one is sure who the cruel pharaoh in Exodus was.

Many different rulers have been mentioned. Other Bible stories that mention Egypt include that of Joseph, who was sold as a slave by his brothers and became a powerful official in the Egyptian government; and in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles we read that a pharaoh named Shishak conquered Jerusalem and carried off its treasures. Shishak is believed to be the Pharaoh Sheshonk I who ruled from 943 to 922 BC. Later, when the cruel King Herod ordered all the young boys in Bethlehem to be killed, Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to Egypt for safety.

Answer: Papyrus

Papyrus is actually a Greek word, from which we get our word "paper." The ancient Egyptians called it "djed" or "tjufi." Papyrus was a plant that grew in marshy areas; to make papyrus, the outer part of the plant was removed, and the inner part was cut into strips. Two layers of strips were laid across each other at right angles while they were still wet, and a heavy weight, such as a stone, was placed on top of them.

After about 21 days the weight was removed, and they had something like a sheet of paper that they could write on. Sometimes the surface was smoothed out by rubbing it with a round rock or pebble. Several pages of papyrus were often glued together to make a longer strip, which could be rolled up to form a scroll. Papyrus was very fragile, but because the climate of Egypt is very dry, many documents written on papyrus have survived for thousands of years.

Answer: Mummies

Not just kings and queens were turned into mummies! Every Egyptian wanted to be mummified after they died, because they believed this was necessary for them to enjoy their afterlife. There were different kinds of mummification procedures, depending on how much a person could pay.

It was an expensive process, and took up to 70 days to make a mummy. But some bodies are still wonderfully preserved after thousands of years. Kings and queens, of course, got the best treatment, and were buried in large and beautifully decorated tombs. Poorer people were often buried together in mass tombs; some tombs have been found that contain over 10,000 mummies! The very poorest people, who could not afford any form of mummification, would often bury their loved ones in the desert, hoping that the dry sand would preserve them.

By the way, mummies don't really come back to life the way they do in some movies!

Answer: King Tutankhamun

Each Egyptian pharaoh had many names; King Tutankhamun's (Tut's) full name was Kanakht Tutmesut Neferhepusegerehtawy Werahamun Nebrdjer Wetjeskhausehetepnetjeru Heqamaatsehetepnetjeru Wetjeskhauitefre Wetjeskhautjestawyim Nebkheperure Tutankhamun Hekaiunushema. No wonder we just call him King Tut, or Tutankhamun! Tutankhamun means "the living image of Amun." Amun was the name of an Egyptian god. Actually, when he was born his name was Tutankhaten. His name was changed later when people stopped worshiping the sun disc, or Aten, and returned to worshiping Amun, whose worship had been forbidden by Tut's father.

At the time when King Tut ruled Egypt the pharaohs were buried in a place called the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile river. Their tombs were all robbed in ancient times by thieves who wanted the magnificent treasures buried along with the pharaohs. If you were caught robbing a tomb in ancient Egypt, you would be put to death, but the tombs, with the exception of King Tut's, were all robbed anyway. King Tut's tomb survived more or less intact because a later king built his tomb nearby, and the the stone chips that were carved out by workers building his tomb fell and covered up the entrance to Tut's tomb. King Tut was a relatively minor pharaoh, but his tomb still contained hundreds of precious golden objects, including a solid gold coffin weighing hundreds of pounds. No wonder the thieves took such great risks to steal the pharaohs' treasures.

Answer: Cleopatra

Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 BC. After his death, one of his generals, a man named Ptolemy, declared himself pharaoh, and his family ruled Egypt for hundreds of years. Cleopatra was the last of his descendants.

In 47 BC, Julius Caesar led a Roman invasion of Egypt, but Cleopatra charmed him into marrying her, even though he already had a wife in Rome. They had a son named Caesarion, and she remained pharaoh. After Caesar was killed, she married Marc Antony, another Roman. A civil war broke out between Marc Antony and Caesar's nephew, Octavian. Antony and Cleopatra's forces were defeated. Rather than be made a prisoner and taken to Rome, she allowed herself to be bitten by a poisonous snake and died in 30 BC. Octavian had her son Caesarion put to death, and there were no more pharaohs after her. Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire.