The author of this thesis does not lay claim to profound scholarship or extended research. It may contain errors that are perceptible to a careful student of Greek archaeology, even without subjecting the paper to a minute scrutiny. The material has been found scattered through the writings of ancient and modern authors and in the records of many excavations and the treasures of many museums. In the process of gathering from so extended a field, it is but natural that mistakes should have crept into the work. The effort has been made to exclude as many errors as possible and to weed out those that could be discovered with as great diligence as the inexperience of the author permitted. The labor of compilation has been undergone in the hope that a connected account of these ancient burial customs might breed an interest in the subject and prove an incentive to a more extended examination by some whose curiosity might not be strong enough or whose leisure time might not be sufficient to gather what was so widely separated.