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The The Ancient World Quiz

Troy to Teotihuacan: the cities and sites the ancients left behind. This pack draws from 69 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

The ancient world is the pack that tests your timeline as much as your map

This pack draws from sixty-nine cities and sites the ancients left behind, from Troy to Teotihuacan, and the difficulty is double: you have to know where a place is AND which civilisation built it, because the clue often names the culture before the country. Babylon is in modern Iraq, but a player who only knows "Mesopotamia" has to place Mesopotamia, which is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq. Persepolis is in Iran, Knossos is on Crete, and Göbekli Tepe, the oldest known megalithic site, sits in southeastern Türkiye. The pack rewards the player who can connect a name to the river valley or the coast that civilisation occupied, not just to the modern country that inherited it.

Point scoring applies, so there is no feature to fall back on, and a "somewhere in the Levant" guess for Byblos or Baalbek costs you the whole Mediterranean coast if you pick the wrong shore.

Five cradles that organise the pack

Mesopotamia. Babylon, Ur, Uruk, Nineveh, Ctesiphon and Hatra all sit in the Tigris-Euphrates basin of modern Iraq. They share a latitude around 30 to 33 degrees north and a flat, riverine setting. If a clue names a Mesopotamian city, the pin belongs in southern Iraq, on the alluvial plain between the two rivers, not on a coast.

The Levant and Anatolia. Jericho, Byblos, Baalbek, Masada, Jerusalem, Troy, Ephesus, Pergamon, Hattusa and Göbekli Tepe ring the eastern Mediterranean. The latitude runs from about 29 to 40 degrees north. Jericho, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities, sits in the Jordan valley near the Dead Sea. Troy is on the Aegean coast of Türkiye. The useful habit is asking whether a Levantine or Anatolian clue belongs on the coast or inland: the trading cities, Byblos and Troy, sit on the shore; the inland sites, Hattusa and Göbekli Tepe, sit up in the Anatolian plateau.

The Nile valley. Karnak, Abu Simbel, Carthage, Leptis Magna, Cyrene, Timgad, Volubilis and Dougga trace the Roman and Egyptian Mediterranean. Karnak and Abu Simbel sit on the Nile in southern Egypt; Carthage is in modern Tunisia; Leptis Magna and Cyrene are in Libya; Timgad and Volubilis are farther west in Algeria and Morocco. The latitude band is wide, from about 24 to 36 degrees north, so the habit is asking which North African coast a Roman site sits on.

The Aegean and the Greek world. Knossos, Mycenae, Delphi and the Minoan and Mycenaean sites cluster in the Aegean, on Crete and the Greek mainland. Knossos is on Crete; Mycenae and Delphi are on the Peloponnese and the mainland. If a clue is Greek and ancient, the pin belongs in the Aegean, not scattered across the Mediterranean.

The Americas and Asia. Teotihuacan, Tikal, Palenque, Monte Albán, Caral, Chan Chan, Tiwanaku and Copán are the pre-Columbian cities, spread from central Mexico to the Andes. Teotihuacan sits near Mexico City; Tikal is in the Petén of Guatemala; Caral is on the Peruvian coast. In Asia, Bagan in Myanmar, Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, Sukhothai and Ayutthaya in Thailand, Hampi, Ellora, Ajanta and Konark in India, and Prambanan and My Son in Southeast Asia are where the chronology tests you most: these are not the Greco-Roman sites, and a "ancient ruins" guess that lands in Anatolia for a Khmer clue is a continent away.

What makes an ancient run hard

The pack's confusables are chronological as much as geographical. Pompeii and Herculaneum sit beside each other near Naples, so the pin is the same either way, but Babylon and Nineveh are both in Iraq and over 350 kilometres apart. Carthage and Caral share a first letter and nothing else; one is in Tunisia, the other in Peru. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are both Indus Valley sites in Pakistan, but they sit hundreds of kilometres apart along the river. The discipline this pack builds is pairing the civilisation with its valley: Mesopotamia is Iraq, the Indus is Pakistan, the Nile is Egypt and Sudan, the Aegean is Greece and Crete. For the systematic way to build the map this pack rewards, the twelve-anchor method sets the fixed points. For the capitals that moved and the ancient sites they left behind, The Capitals Nobody Guesses traces the modern cities that replaced them.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

  • Abu Simbel · Egypt
  • Ajanta · India
  • Aksum · Ethiopia
  • Anuradhapura · Sri Lanka
  • Ayutthaya · Thailand
  • Baalbek · Lebanon
  • Babylon · Iraq
  • Bagan · Myanmar
  • Byblos · Lebanon
  • Cahokia · Illinois, USA

…and 59 more across the pack.

Play the The Ancient World quiz

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