HAUSSALAND 261 movement, having points of resemblance to the Phoenician worship of Astarte, and assimilated with a superior order of native civilisation, superseded the fetishism which is now to be found among the tribes of the coast, driving it gradually towards the south, and that the difference between the peoples professing this form of paganism and the cannibal fetish worshippers, was scarcely less than the difference which afterwards declared itself between the peoples who accepted Mohammedanism and those who retained the local form of goddess-worship.

Interest is added to the subject by the fact that the three types still exist, and can be studied in Nigeria, where it may be said that, at the present day, three distinct historic ages are persisting contemporaneously.

After dominating the southern provinces, Zaria in its turn was dominated, as we have seen, by Kano. With the rise of Kano, and its conversion to Mohammedanism in the thirteenth century, we enter historic times, and the history of Kano involves to some extent the history of the principal provinces of Haussaland. After the period of the Moorish conquest, its arms, which had been directed to the south and east, were turned more continually to the north and west. In its later history Katsena, Zamfara, and Gober, take the place previously occupied by Zaria and the southern provinces, with the difference that, following the mysterious law by which conquest remained ever with the north, Katsena in the first instance established its superiority, and, after Katsena, Gober, a still more northern state, took the leading place, until the Fulani eruption of the nineteenth century, issuing from Gober, subjugated the whole of Haussaland.

Katsena, whose literature, like that of Kano, was purposely destroyed by the Fulani at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but of whose history a chronicle similar to the Kano chronicle has been preserved, would seem to have risen into importance somewhat later than Kano.

The dates which have been examined and accepted by