Grave robbery, tomb robbing, or tomb raiding is the act of uncovering a grave, tomb or crypt to steal commodities; the term looting is also used. It is usually perpetrated to take and profit from valuable artefacts or personal property. A related act is body snatching, a term denoting the contested or unlawful taking of a body (usually from a grave), which can be extended to the unlawful taking of organs alone.

Grave robbing has caused great difficulty to the studies of archaeology, art history, and history. Countless precious grave sites and tombs have been robbed before scholars were able to examine them. In any way, the archaeological context and the historical and anthropological information are destroyed:

Looting obliterates the memory of the ancient world and turns its highest artistic creations into decorations, adornments on a shelf, divorced from historical context and ultimately from all meaning.

Grave robbers who are not caught usually sell relatively modern items anonymously and artifacts on the black market. Those intercepted, in a public justice domain, are inclined to deny their guilt. Though some artifacts may make their way to museums or scholars, the majority end up in private collections.

Grave robbing in China is a practice stretching back to antiquity; the classic Chinese text Lüshi Chunqiu, dating to the 2nd century BCE, advised readers to plan simple burials to discourage looting. The presence of jade burial suits and other valuables in tombs were powerful temptations to rob graves.

In modern China, grave robbing has been perpetrated by both amateurs (such as farmers and migrant laborers) and by professional thieves associated with transnational criminal networks. The practice reached epidemic proportions in the 1980s, as the development and construction boom following the reform and opening up led to many archaeological sites being revealed. Other peaks of tomb robbing occurred in the early 2000s and in the 2010s, when the plunder of graves was on the upswing due to an increase in global and domestic demand (and prices) for Chinese antiquities. The provinces of Henan, Shaanxi, and Shanxi were particularly affected by tomb robbing.

Ancient Egyptian tombs are one of the most common examples of tomb or grave robbery. Most of the tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings were robbed within one hundred years of their sealing (including the tomb of the famous King Tutankhamen, which was raided at least twice before it was discovered in 1922). As most of the artifacts in these ancient burial sites have been discovered, it is through the conditions of the tombs and presumed articles that are missing in which historians and archaeologists are able to determine whether the tomb has been robbed. Egyptian pharaohs often kept records of the precious items in their tombs, so an inventory check is presumed for archaeologists. Oftentimes, warnings would be left by the Pharaohs in the tombs of calamities and curses that would be laid upon any who touched the treasure, or the bodies, which did little to deter grave robbers. There are many examples of grave robbing in the Ancient World outside of Egypt.

The Romans (Byzantium) also suffered decades of theft and destruction of tombs, crypts, and graves.