Grave: Did you mean...?

Although women in the Viking Age (c. 790-1100 CE) lived in a male-dominated society, far from being powerless, they ran farms and households, were responsible for textile production, moved away from Scandinavia to help settle Viking territories...

Burial in ancient Mesopotamia was the practice of interring a corpse in a grave or tomb while observing certain rites, primarily to ensure the passage of the soul of the deceased to the underworld and prevent its return to haunt the living...

A great deal has been written about why the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, southern England, was constructed. Perhaps it was designed as a temple to the ancestors, an astronomical calendar, a healing centre or a giant computer...

A belief in an afterlife was central to every major civilization of the ancient world and this encouraged the recognition of the reality of ghosts as the spirits of the departed who, for one reason or another, either returned from the realm...

In Norse belief, the soul of the deceased might wind up in any one of a number of afterlife realms. There was Valhalla, the realm of Odin where the dead warriors drank, fought, and told stories, Folkvangr ('the Field of the People'), the...

Egyptian burial is the common term for the ancient Egyptian funerary rituals concerning death and the soul's journey to the afterlife. Eternity, according to scholar Margaret Bunson, “was the common destination of each man, woman and child...

The practice of mummifying the dead began in ancient Egypt c. 3500 BCE. The English word mummy comes from the Latin mumia which is derived from the Persian mum meaning 'wax' and refers to an embalmed corpse which was wax-like. The idea of...

A tomb is an enclosed space for the repository of the remains of the dead. Traditionally tombs have been located in caves, underground, or in structures designed specifically for the purpose of containing the remains of deceased human beings...

Giza is a plateau southwest of modern Cairo which served as the necropolis for the royalty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Most famous for the pyramids of Khufu (completed c. 2560 BCE) Khafre (c. 2530 BCE) and Menkaure (c. 2510 BCE) and the...

Grave relief for Euxenides, Athens, 330 BCE. Marble, Nye Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen, Denmark). Made with Memento Beta (now ReMake) from AutoDesk. The exact meaning of the handshake, dexiosis, in Attic grave reliefs is debatable, for...