[2] The ancient city of Phaena, judging by the ruin field still visible at Masmiya in the 19th century, had a radius of roughly three miles, making it as large as the ancient walled area of Damascus and larger than the Old City of Jerusalem[3] (which is of Early Muslim date in its present outline and smaller than some of its earlier iterations).

[clarification needed][10] During the Byzantine period it became an episcopal see, whose bishops participated in the ecumenical councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451).

[4][5] In 1810, Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt was the first contemporary scholar to visit al-Masmiyah and he was later followed by Bankes and Barry, who sketched a precise plan of the Praetorium, in 1819.

[12] By the late 1860s a few impoverished Arab families from the Sulut tribe reportedly lived inside the ruins of al-Masmiyah.

[13] Apparently, the village was abandoned most of the time, but was occasionally occupied by nomadic Arab families seeking shelter in its ruins.

[4] However, it was later settled when the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909) acquired al-Masmiyah and six other nearby Hauran villages in the late 19th century as a personal estate.

They were also exempt from conscription, protected from monetary collections from local notables and at times were loaned money without interest.

[11] In 1886, al-Masmiyah was briefly occupied by the Druze clans of Atrash and Halabi during a quarrel with the Sulut tribe.

According to Western traveler Josias Leslie Porter who visited the region in the late 1850s, the ruins of al-Masmiyah "are among the most interesting and beautiful in the Hauran," not least due to its numerous Greek inscriptions.

[11] It had a rectangular ground plan with a semi-circular apse that projected onto one side of the building opposite of the doorway.

[17][18] The roof had been supported by four free-standing columns fixed at the inner angles of cross-vaulted arches,[7] which together formed a Greek cross.