[2][3] Important inscriptions are found in Petra (now in Jordan), the Sinai Peninsula (now part of Egypt), and other archaeological sites including Abdah (in Palestine) and Mada'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia.

[5] Prior to the publication of Nabataean papyri, the only substantial corpus of detailed Nabataean text were the 38 funerary inscriptions from Hegra (Mada'in Salih), discovered and published by Charles Montagu Doughty, Charles Huber, Philippe Berger and Julius Euting in 1884-85.

In turn, a cursive form of Nabataean developed into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century,[3] which is why Nabataean's letterforms are intermediate between the more northerly Semitic scripts (such as the Aramaic-derived Hebrew) and those of Arabic.

As compared to other Aramaic-derived scripts, Nabataean developed more loops and ligatures, likely to increase speed of writing.

The Nabataean alphabet (U+10880–U+108AF) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.