date palms and gardens; in the 14th century, Mustafi wrote of the fame of its palm groves. Medieval Arab poets celebrated Anah's wine; Between the 14th and 17th centuries, Anah served as a headquarters for a host of regional Arab tribes. Starting around 1535, the town served as the de facto capital of the Abu Rish Bedouin emirs, whom the Ottomans appointed as governors of several s (provinces) as well as çöl beyis or "desert emirs". In 1574, Leonhart Rauwolff found the town divided into two parts, the Turkish "so surrounded by the river that you cannot go into it but by boats" and the larger Arabian section along one of the banks. In 1610, Texeira said Anah lay on both banks of the river, with which Pietro Della Valle agreed. In that year, Della Valle found the Scot George Strachan resident at Anah, working as the physician to the emir and studying Arabic; he also found some "sun worshippers" (actually Alawites) still living there. Della Valle and Texeira called Anah the principal Arab town on the Euphrates, controlling a major route west from Baghdad and territory reaching Palmyra. Late Ottoman era About 1750, the Ottomans installed a rudimentary administration to run Anah and its district. After roughly a century, a more organized local government was put in place, whereby Anah became the center of a kaza belonging to the Baghdad Vilayet. At the beginning of the 19th century, G.A. Olivier found only 25 men in service of the local prince, with residents fleeing daily to escape from bedouin attacks against which he offered no protection. He described the city as a single long street of five or six miles along a narrow strip of land between the river and a ridge of rocky hills. W. F. Ainsworth, chronicling the British Euphrates expedition, reported that in 1835 the Arabs inhabited the northwest part of the town, the Christians the center, and the Jews the southeast. The same year, the steamer Tigris went down in a storm just above Anah, near where Julian's force had suffered from a similar storm. By the mid-19th century, the houses were separated from one another by fruit gardens, which also filled the riverine islands near the town. The most easterly island contained a ruined castle, while the ruins of ancient Anatho extended a further two miles along the left bank. It marked the boundary between