The symbolic meaning of the dome has developed over millennia. Although the precise origins are unknown, a mortuary tradition of domes existed across the ancient world, as well as a symbolic association with the sky. Both of these traditions may have a common root in the use of the domed hut, a shape which was associated with the heavens and translated into tombs.

The mortuary tradition has been expressed in domed mausolea, martyria, and baptisteries. The celestial symbolism was adopted by rulers in the Middle East to emphasize their divine legitimacy and was inherited by later civilizations down to the present day as a general symbol of governmental authority.

The meaning of the dome has been extensively analyzed by architectural historians. According to Nicola Camerlenghi, it may not be possible to arrive at a single "fixed meaning and universal significance" for domes across all building types and locations throughout history, since the shape, function, and context for individual buildings were determined locally, even if inspired by distant predecessors, and meaning could change over time. Cyril Mango wrote that a symbolic interpretation of architecture was consistent with "the workings of the medieval mind", although simply accepting a celestial meaning of the dome and an imperial connotation for the ciborium, for example, did not explain the variety of forms. Yasser Tabbaa considered domes to be the "ultimate aesthetic statements of many architectural traditions and as repositories of iconography and cosmology".

According to E. Baldwin Smith, from the late Stone Age the dome-shaped tomb was used as a reproduction of the ancestral, god-given shelter made permanent as a venerated home of the dead and the instinctive desire to do this resulted in widespread domical mortuary traditions across the ancient world, from the stupas of India to the tholos tombs of Iberia. Michele Melaragno noted that the Scythians built such domed tombs, as did some Germanic tribes in a paraboloid shape.

Per Smith, by Hellenistic and Roman times, the domical tholos had become the customary cemetery symbol. Jodi Magness noted that domed ceilings in Jewish catacombs in Rome displayed images of the menorah by the 3rd or 4th century in order to evoke the Temple and because the number seven represented, in the words of Rachel Elior, the "span of time needed for the transition from chaos to Creation, from impurity to purity and from death to life."

Lukas Nickel wrote that the conception of a round heaven over a square earth may have contributed to the Han Chinese' rapid adoption in the first century AD of square base cloister vault chambers in their tomb architecture.

Smith wrote that in the process of transforming the hut shape from its original pliable materials into more difficult stone construction, the dome had also become associated with celestial and cosmic significance, as evident from decoration such as stars and celestial chariots on the ceilings of domed tombs. This cosmological thinking was not limited to domed ceilings, being part of a symbolic association between any house, tomb, or sanctuary and the universe as a whole, but it popularized the use of the domical shape.

Michele Melaragno wrote that the nomadic tribes of central Asia are the origin of a symbolic tradition of round domed-tents being associated with the sky and heavens that eventually spread to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Smith noted that one way the Romans depicted the celestial tent in architecture was as a corrugated or gored dome.