While the purpose of some of the buildings is not clear, archaeologists believe that the whole complex was a suburb of Petra, the Nabatean capital, meant to house visiting traders on the Silk Road.

In 2010, a biclinium, or dining room, in one of the caves was discovered to have surviving interior art depicting grapes, vines and putti in great detail with a varied palette, probably in homage to the Greek god Dionysus and the consumption of wine.

[4] It is on the local road that leaves Wadi Musa and follows the edge of the mountains around Petra itself through the small Bedouin village of Umm Sayhoun.

About 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) north of Wadi Musa, a short road to the west leads to the narrow, unpaved parking lot for Little Petra[5] and Beidha, a Neolithic site nearby.

The modern name "Little Petra" comes from its similarities to the larger site to the south—both must be entered via a narrow canyon, and consist primarily of Nabataean buildings.

[9] Since investigations of the site have generally focused on the Nabataean and earlier periods, it is not known whether it was still inhabited around the same time Petra was abandoned, in the 7th century.

[11] When Swiss traveler Jacob Burckhardt became the first nonlocal visitor to Petra since Roman times in 1812, he did not venture to its north, or did not write about it.

The wadi is a rich archaeological site, featuring rock cut tombs, stone-built architecture, and complex hydrological engineering.

The site is located in the fertile northern hinterlands of Petra, a landscape that preserves evidence of large-scale viticulture and wine making, alongside the cultivation of grains, olives, and other produce.

Surrounding the Painted Biclinium are a series of tombs and banqueting halls cut into the natural sandstone of the wadi, alongside the foundations of freestanding structures, cisterns, and water channels.

Studies of the frescoes relied almost exclusively on these early photographs, focusing on the visible iconography of the scenes and identifying the figures of Eros and Pan.

[17] From 2006–2010, the Petra National Trust and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London carried out an extensive conservation project in the Painted Biclinium, which revealed new imagery on the monument and made clear the vibrancy of the color and style of the artwork.

[18] The Painted Biclinium comprises rock-cut stairs leading up from the floor of the Siq al-Barid, terminating at a platform hewn from the wall of the narrow wadi.

Instead of architectural embellishment, the walls and vaulted ceiling of this room exhibit a complex program of intertwining vines, flowers, figures, several varieties of local birds, and insects.

Several erotes—small winged gods associated with love and occasionally the cultivation of wine—are seen participating in viticulture management, using ladders and pruning hooks, carrying baskets of gathered grapes, and defending the vines from scavenging birds.

However, the overall iconographic scene and architectural parallels elsewhere in the area of Petra lend weight to the attribution of the space as a center of Dionysiac worship.

The features of the figural composition, including the almond eyes and round chins, have parallels with other pieces of Hellenistic painting and mosaic, while the floral and faunal subjects are distinctly local.

[20] The Painted Biclinium, then, serves to provide a colorful flourish to our understanding of this religious tradition in the cultivated rich semi-arid landscape around Petra.