3 ideas
Browne builds his meditation on a set of burial urns dug up at Old Walsingham, which he confidently takes to be Roman. They are now understood to be Anglo-Saxon. The mistake enacts his own thesis: even the scholar trying to recover the dead cannot correctly name whose ashes he is holding.
Pyramids, epitaphs and preserved names do not beat oblivion. They either decay, outlast any knowledge of whom they honor, or keep a name with no person attached. Browne notes that more men are forgotten than remembered, and that iniquitous oblivion hands out fame at random rather than by merit.
How a people disposes of its dead (burning, burying, embalming, what they place in the grave) shows what it believes about the body, the soul and the afterlife. Comparing funeral rites across cultures becomes a way of comparing metaphysics. Grave goods show which parts of earthly life the living expected to continue after death.