In the course of his career, he traveled across Syria, cataloging in detail information about the country's tribes and monuments, which he published in several widely-cited works.
[5][3] Later in 1916 he was dispatched by the authorities to Deir ez-Zor to help resolve an epidemic of locusts destroying croplands in the Euphrates valley.
[3] Commenting on the general lack of modernization in the country, Zakariyya stated "He who enters Yemen is lost, and he who leaves it is reborn".
[5] The Iraqi government appointed him as an educator in Baghdad's Rural Teachers' House school, a post he held until 1941.
[3] Zakariyya's Jawla Āthāriyya fī Baʿḍ al-Bilād al-Shāmiyya [An Archaeological Journey through Some of Greater Syria], published in Damascus in 1934 was a resume of Evliya Celebi's travel account of Bilad al-Sham (greater Syria) with substantial commentary by Zakariyya.
He published his own work collecting his detailed descriptions of Syria's monuments, pre-Islamic and Islamic, and the places where they stood in his two-volume al-Rif al-Suri ('the Syrian Countryside').
The book lamented the state of Syria's monuments and warned their neglect and lack of protection would lead to their destruction.