The Rome catacombs then fell victim to pillaging by Germanic invaders around the early 9th Century.
The catacombs of Malta are designated as a World Heritage Site for their role in Paleochristian history.
There are only six known Jewish catacombs and around 40 or more Christian catacombs.
Christians were buried by the Via Appia too, in the catacombs that run for miles underground.
In the 18th century the Catacombs became known as the Empire of the Dead.
Centuries later in Paris, catacombs emerged as a creative and discreet solution to a dire public health problem.
Of the sites below, only the Paris and Odessa Catacombs have small stretches that are legal to visit.
The imperial city has been a prominent tourist destination since the early Middle Ages, with striking ruins, catacombs and holy sites.
As a result, relics of Christian martyrs and saints were moved from the catacombs to churches in the city centre.
Here are the catacombs, where Christians used to bury their dead, in a kind of warren-like after-dead ghetto outside the city walls.
The use of catacombs in Rome expanded during the 2nd and 3rd Centuries, as the illegal religion of Christianity grew in popularity.
From here the exhibition moves through a series of vaulted halls long, narrow spaces that have the feeling of high-fashion catwalks or, when painted black, dank Roman catacombs.
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In Alexandria, Egypt, the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa were originally built for just one rich family around the 2nd Century, but eventually housed more 300 mummies.
People are walking dogs, cyclists whizz past and tourists examine maps, their footsteps following where Roman soldiers forged and Christians scrawled still-visible commemorative graffiti in the catacombs.
Today, travellers from all over the world visit Rome to explore its 600km network of catacombs, spread out over five storeys underground near the Park of the Tombs of Via Latina.
For those who want to find out, but are not willing to take the risk of going in unsupervised, there is a legal, tourist-friendly public entrance to the catacombs off Place Denfert-Rochereau.
Sacred catacombs open to the public include the Catacombs of Priscilla (Via Salaria, 430), the Catacombs of St Callixtus (Via Appia Antica, 110-126) and the Catacombs of St Agnes (Via Nomentana, 349).
Beneath the city streets that travellers walk on each day, dark labyrinths of underground catacombs are passageways to the past, to a time when the ghostly tunnels served as burial grounds for millions of people.
The catacombs of Rome, which date back to the 1st Century and were among the first ever built, were constructed as underground tombs, first by Jewish communities and then by Christian communities.
You play as Shawn, a rogue attending a university for heroes who interacts and competes with fellow students and can travel down into the catacombs at night and go on quests and solve puzzles.
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As in Paris, the tunnels were used as bunkers and hideouts by soldiers during World War II, and a portion of the catacombs is open to the public via the Museum of Partisan Glory.
But after Christianity was legalized in 313 AD, funerals moved above ground, and by the 5th Century, the use of catacombs as grave sites dwindled, though they were still revered as sacred sites where pilgrims would come to worship.
While few would go to the lengths of the ancient Egyptians, whose desert cemeteries include several thousand animals and at least 2m mummified birds in the catacombs of the sacred ibises, the modern burial ritual is still an elaborate affair.
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