During excavations in 1935–37,[3] a major trove of sixth- and seventh-century papyri in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Nabataean, and Syriac[4] was discovered at this site, revealing a wealth of information about day-to-day life in Nabataean society between 505 and 689 CE, the last phase of Byzantine administration and the earliest phase of Arabic Islam.

[5] The find sites were two store rooms in the ruined Church of Mary Mother of God and of the soldier saints Sergius and Bacchus.

Private documents, such as wills, greatly outnumber official ones: a fragmentary text of Virgil and a Latin-Greek glossary of the Aeneid, fragments of the Gospel of John and early seventh-century church archives, and the personal papers of "George, son of Patrick", on the one hand, and the archives of the military unit, "Numerus of the Most Loyal Theodosians" on the other.

[6] Onomastics show that the largely Nabataean inhabitants of the city had become Christianized and Romanized in the early centuries CE, as well as documenting the arrival of a Byzantine phylarchate.

One of the last of the papyri describes coinage struck and soldiers employed by 'Abd al-Malik, replacing the Roman institutions with a new Umayyad power structure.