Man is the only creature that buries its dead, and in all societies have existed beliefs about souls, spirits and life after death, so the rites farewell present very different forms throughout the world and across all times.
Funeral rites can be grouped into two classes, according to the sense that each community gives to death. On the one hand, there are companies who believe that the body loses an essential part of the person, for another, convinced that the soul is earlier than our life in this world and survives bodily death.
In the first, to be mummified corpses and filled the graves of personal belongings, food and offerings to anticipate the resurrection in the future and help the soul on its journey to another life: Jews, Vikings, Jews, Arabs, Christians and However, Egyptians did it. Those who believe in reincarnation of the soul, as Hindus and Buddhists, preferring other approaches, such as cremation.
The first known tombs dating from the Stone Age, around the year 3000 BC. In them, the corpses are lying to one side and shrinkage, and along with them there is food, tools and ornaments. As far back as ancient Mesopotamia is believed that those who were buried could cause bad misfortune. The Cretans registered addresses for another life in the graves of their dead, and Greeks and Romans provided them with money to the gods and even cakes for cancerbero, the watchdog of the gates of beyond.
But those who carried farther worship funeral were Egyptians. At the time of the pharaohs, keep the body was thought necessary to access another life, and for this purpose and noble kings did preserve his remains and equipment luxuriously their graves waiting for the day of his resurrection. Once dead, their viscera were kept in so-called "glasses CANopen" (equivalent to the relics of saints among Christians and Arabs), embalming the rest with special compounds, some funerals are held dances that could include mortuary and athletic competitions, is deposited the bodies in developed niches and wooden and stone sarcophagi, and pyramids were built luxuriously ornadas and inaccessible to the living to accommodate them.