Overview[edit]

The word is used in a broad sense to encompass a number of such types of places of interment or,
occasionally, burial, including:

 Architectural shrines – in Christianity, an architectural shrine above a saint's first place of burial,
as opposed to a similar [2] on which stands a reliquary or feretory into which the saint's remains
have been transferred
 Burial vault – a stone or brick-lined underground space for multiple burials, originally vaulted,
often privately owned for specific family groups; usually beneath a religious building such as
a church or in a churchyard or cemetery
 Church monument – within a church (or a tomb-style chest in a churchyard) may be a place of
interment, but this is unusual; it may more commonly stand over the grave or burial vault rather
than containing the actual body and therefore is not a tomb.
 Crypts – often, though not always, for interment; similar to burial vaults but usually for more
general public interment
 Hypogeum tomb - stone-built underground structure for interment, such as the tombs of ancient
Egypt
 Kokh (tomb) – a rectangular rock-cut sloping space, running inward, like tunnels into rock,
sufficiently high and wide to permit the admission of a corpse