 After a generation, the bones were moved to a bone chamber or, later, into ossuaries and the benches used for new burials.Rock tombs were the province of the wealthy; the common people were buried in the ground.The earliest Canaanite cut-rock cave tombs date from 3100–2900 BCE, but the custom had lapsed a millennium before the earliest Israelite tombs, which date to the 9th century BCE in Jerusalem.