The view from the top is well worth the hard, 40-minute climb, but this trip should be made only with a local guide who knows the way up, because the path is not always clear and it can be dangerous to stray from it. Along the way to the summit you can see varied facades, they are combination of houses and tombs, sited along natural faults in the rock that have been exploited to form four streets.
The different styles of these facades reflect the evolution of Nabataean architecture over time. At the left end of the upper row of the monuments there is a large tomb façade that rises higher than the others; it has been carved well back into the cliff-face, leaving two sharply angled walls on both sides. To the left of this tomb are two smaller ones, with a large, gorge-like crevice in the rock between them, this crevice is the start of the path to the top of the mountain. Mention should be made of the eight cisterns cut deep into the rock which give the mountain its name, Umm el-Biyarra- mother of cisterns.
These deep, bell-shaped cisterns formed a highly effective water-storage system where even in hot weather evaporation would have been only slight. Early archaeologists expressed grief that these were filled with rubble and earth but one of them has been cleaned out and its considerable size and depth are revealed. The excavated artifacts from the site included loom weights, much domestic pottery, shells, lamps and a few metal objects. A room towards the north end of the complex had a special plastered floor built above the regular bed-rock level. In another room the excavators found a seal impression attached to a sack and still showing the imprints of the sack's threads.
The place is supposed to be an Edomite settlement, archeologists alleged that the proof of that is the clay royal seal impression, of an Edomite king named Qos Gabr, which was baked hard in the final fire and preserved.
