Riddles of the Ages Trivia Quiz

Answer:

1. One of humanity's oldest surviving riddles was found etched onto a clay tablet roughly 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Written by the Sumerians, the puzzle asks: "There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?" The ancient unknown scribes also included the solution directly on the tablet; the answer is a school. The culture valued education so "blindness" represents a person's initial ignorance and lack of literacy, while "seeing" is the sudden enlightenment and gaining of knowledge.

2. From the 13th century saga "Hervarar", it is shown that the "shining maids" with "white hair" are the white-capped ocean waves, while their "unloving father" is Aegir, the Norse god of the sea, who was often viewed by seafaring Vikings as a cold and indifferent force of nature. The image of these sisters "fighting together" is the tossing of a stormy sea, and their act of "going to bed in a gale" describes how the waves finally crash, break, and flatten out on the shore during a bad storm.

3. Leonardo DaVinci loved writing observation-based riddles. He also spent countless hours calculating exactly how light behaves. This puzzle combines them both. "A small thing which grows grandly" refers to the fact that if you place a small object very close to a candle or a lamp, it blocks part of the light, casting a large shadow on the opposite wall. "Its size will decrease as its distance increases": This denotes the idea that as you pull the small object farther away from the light source and move it closer to the wall, the shadow shrinks back down, matching the object's actual dimensions.

4. The Incas, who lived in South America, relied on corn (or maize) as a sacred, life-sustaining crop. In this cultural riddle from them, the "mother" is the tall corn stalk itself. Her "thousands of children" are the individual ears of corn growing along the stalk as well as the countless kernels in them. Each individual ear is tightly "wrapped in a green blanket" which represents the protective outer green husks. Finally, the "golden beard" describes the bunch of corn silk that grows out of the top of the husk.

5. The ancient Egyptian "Riddle of the Sphinx" became famous through Sophocles' tragic play, "Oedipus Rex", which was performed around 429 BCE. The Sphinx, a monster with the body of a lion, the wings of a bird, and the face of a human, sat outside the city of Thebes, terrorizing travelers by asking them a puzzle. If they failed to answer, she ate them. In the play, Oedipus saved the city by correctly answering. It was explained that in the morning a human was a baby, crawling on all fours. At noon, the human was an adult and walked upright on two legs. In the evening, the human was elderly and used a cane as a third foot. Upon hearing the correct answer, the defeated Sphinx threw herself from her high perch to her death.