In charge to publish the corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions from Southern Syria, Maurice Sartre, in collaboration with Annie Sartre-Fauriat since 1982, has explored all the ancient sites and present-day villages in the country's two southern provinces. This lengthy investigation, which began in 1969 and was interrupted by the popular uprising of 2011, has made it possible to recover some of the texts published over the past two centuries, but above all to increase the corpus with more than 1,000 new texts illustrating all aspects of life in the region between the 1st and 7th centuries AD. This abundant documentation is all the more valuable given that the region is ignored in ancient literature and that it comes from both the main urban sites (Bostra, Canatha, Philippopolis) and more than 300 villages, and even from steppe campsites. The constant support of the population greatly contributed to the emergence of this exceptional density of ancient inscriptions, even in rural areas, which is almost unique in the Roman Empire.