A Tour of Tombs Trivia Quiz

Answer: Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, England

The story goes that King Canute's advisers, hoping to impress their lord with their loyalty to him, told him that as king his power was absolute and that, truly, nothing was impossible for him. He then took his court to a beachhead where he sat for hours and commanded the tide not to come in.

The tide, of course, came in. Canute had shown his advisers that he did not want their flattery. Jane Austen is also buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Answer: Unknown

The legend is that, one day while riding with his armies in the steppes of Mongolia, Genghis declared that this land was so beautiful that he wanted to be buried at that spot. No one today knows where that spot is, though. His death was the only time a civil war did not follow the death of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire - it was these succession struggles that tore the empire apart within a few generations.

Answer: Woodrow Wilson

After running for his second term on a platform of peace - his slogan was 'He kept us out of war' - Wilson brought the United States into World War I in 1917. Although the speeches around his tomb speak eloquently of freedom, equality, and making the world 'safe for democracy,' Wilson himself was infamously bigoted, requiring black federal employees to hang bedsheets around their desks so that whites would not have to look at them, and referring to Slavs and Southern Europeans as lower races in his 'History of the American People.'

Answer: Toshogu Shrine, Nikko, Japan

The shrine itself was built as a mausoleum in 1617, and most of the surrounding buildings were constructed by the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, in 1636. Tokugawa Ieyasu ended the long period of civil war between Japan's feudal lords, and the shogunate he founded lasted until 1868, when full powers were again granted to the Emperor in the Meiji Restoration.

Answer: National Pantheon, Caracas, Venezuela

Bolivar (1783-1830) led revolutions against Spain in what is now Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. This is why he is in Venezuela's Pantheon of National Heroes today. (Interestingly, the cathedral in Lima, Peru, is reputedly where Pizarro - the conquistador who destroyed the Inca Empire - is buried.)

Answer: Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony, whose portrait appeared on the U.S. silver dollar, was a tireless crusader. She was first an abolitionist, then a lobbyist for the temperance movement, then a suffragist, doing her most famous work lobbying for the right of women to vote.

She died in 1906 at the age of 86, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution finally granted the right she had spent much of her life fighting to gain.

Answer: Stanger, South Africa

Shaka Zulu (1787-1828) revolutionized tactics in southern Africa, organizing his warriors into well-disciplined units expert in the art of flanking their opponents. (He is also often credited with inventing a short, broad-bladed stabbing spear for use in close combat.) His leadership enabled the Zulu, who are estimated to have numbered less than 1500 in 1816, to establish hegemony over the entire region by the time of his death.

In 1828 he began to show signs of psychosis, which affected his decisions, and was assassinated by two of his half-brothers.

Answer: The Kremlin Wall

Stalin (born Dzugashvili) died in 1953, having killed - through famine, purges, and confinement in gulags - an estimated 30 million Russians. By 1956 his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, began to disavow Stalin's deeds in a program of 'de-Stalinization'.

In 1961 a movement crystallized to remove Stalin from Lenin's tomb, where the two Soviet leaders lay embalmed in glass coffins as inspiration to their countrymen. Stalin's body was moved to the Kremlin Wall - where minor Bolshevik leaders of the Russian Revolution are buried - under cover of night; his grave is now marked with a simple tombstone and a small bust.

Answer: Ommayad Mosque

The others are all buildings in Syria, although the Qala'at Samaan is a basilica dedicated to St. Simon, not a mosque. Saladin, who was born in 1138 in Iraq, rose through the ranks to attain hegemony over Egypt, and his counteroffensives to the Crusades have won him admiration and respect in Europe and Arabia.

Answer: The Taj Mahal

Shah Jahan bankrupted his government building the Taj Mahal, a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal (who had died in 1631, giving birth to their seventeenth child). Upon his own death in 1666, he was buried next to her central tomb. Their sarcophagi are below ground, their locations marked on the floor above by marble cenotaphs and semi-precious stones.