Hi simplyme, that's interesting, it's nice to have somebody give us another culture's perspective, I agree with you that individual tombs are a waste of land.
Are you Pakistani Christian?
Are your tombs like a morgue? Do you 'bury' your dead above ground? Pakistani Pagans known as the Kalash leave their dead in caskets in the forest above ground too.
Can I ask what do you do with the remains of the previous body? How do you dispose of them?
I know bones don't disintegrate very quickly, recently at Golra-Sharif near Islamabad a 100 yr old graveyard was dug up to make room for a carpark or motorway and the bones are still solid.
Our Muslim scriptures call for very simple graves, fancy marble headstones and great big structures are seen as useless and wasteful in our religion (the money is better given away in charity) but some Muslims still insist on building great big extravangant graves.
Traditional Muslim funerals are very simple, the body is washed, shrouded in a simple white cloth and then prayed for over and then buried in a simple grave, plastering the grave or putting fancy headstones on it is against our religion.
In my village our older generation followed a "Catholic-like" denomination of Islam that wasn't really inline with the scriptures but popular, we had Muslim saints just like Catholics do with great big mausoleums and tombs built for them but now our village people have turned to a more "Protestant-like" version of Islam so all these tombs are being knocked down leaving a simple grave where the so called saint is buried and the land around the grave used as a general graveyard.
Exactly.
After burial the body is bound to disintegrate anyway, the chemical just speeds up the process.
Some soils are naturally very corrosive anyway.