NECROPOLIS, a Greek term, meaning the city of the dead, and applied to the cem eteries in the vicinity of ancient cities. It occurs in classical antiquity only as applied to a suburb of Alexandria, lying to the w. of that having many shops and gardens and places suitable for the reception of the dead. ' The corpses were received and embalmed in it. Hare Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, applied the asp to her breast to avoid the ignominy of being led in triumph by Augustus. The site of the necropolis of ancient Alexandria seems to have been where are now the catacombs, consisting of galleries and tombs hollowed out of the soft calcareous stone of which the city is built, and lying at the extremity of the city. The term necropolis is now, however, used in a much more extended sense, and applied to all the cemeteries of the ancient world. These consisted either of tombs, constructed in the shape of houses and temples, and arranged in streets, like a city of the dead; or else of chambers hollowed in the rock, and ornamented with façades to imitate houses and temples. Such cemeteries are to be distinguished from the cob/mbar/a, or subterraneons chambers of the Romans, in which their urns were deposited: or the rows of tombs along the Via Appia; or the cemeteries of the Christians, whose bodies were deposited in the ground. The most remarkable
necropolises are that of Thebes in Egypt, situated at a place called Gournah, on the left bank of the Nile, capable of holding 3.000 persons, and which it is calculated must at least have contained 5,000 mummies; those of El-Kab or Eileithyia; of Beni-Hassan, or the Speos Artemidos; and of Madfun or Abydos; of Si•ah or the oasis of Ammon. See OASTS. In Africa the necropolis of Cyrene is also extensive; and those of Vulci, Cornett), Tarquinii, and Capua, are distinguished for their painted tombs (see Tomn), and the numerous vases and other objects of ancient art whici have been exhumed from them. Large necropolises have also been found in Lycia,. Sicily, and trabo, xviii. op. 795-799; Plutarch, vit Anton; Letronne. Journal des Savans, 1828, p. 103; Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, i. 412, i. 276-358.