Old Prussians were a native tribe of the Baltic people who lived in the Prussian territory on the south-eastern side of the Baltic Sea, between the Vistula Lagoon to the west and the Curonian Lagoon to the east. According to narrative of Tacitus from 98 CE, the first native inhabitants of that area were the pagans known as the Aesti. Despite having relatively few things in common with them, the Old Prussians, who spoke the Indo-European language now known as Old Prussian language and worshipped pagan gods, gave the later, primarily the Low German-speaking residents of the area their name. The Teutonic Order did not subdue the Old Prussians or capture their territory until the 13th century. Over the course of the ensuing two centuries, the last of the Old Prussians were assimilated. By the seventeenth century, the mainly unrecorded Old Prussian language had all but vanished. The names of places like the Vistula Lagoon, Aīstinmari and Aistmarės, which are modern Lithuanian and Old Prussian respectively, seem to have been derived from Aesti and Mari (freshwater bodies or lagoons), suggesting that the region around the lagoon had connections to the Aesti. Both the initial Old Prussian settlement areas of the eastern and western Baltics were significantly larger than they are now. The archaeological records and related discoveries attest to an unbroken existence from the Iron Age of the fifth century to the consecutive conquests by Slavic tribes that started during the Migration Period. Polydoxy has been compared to Baltic form of paganism. This is a conviction that all forces of nature and occurrences, which are impersonal but possess their own spiritual and mystical abilities, are sacred. In reality, there are an infinite number of spirits and devils roaming the earth. These beliefs in the death after life, the soul and ancestor worship are each connected with a distinct cult and set of rites. Other scholars assert that Prussian polytheism was sophisticated and well-developed, with a clear pantheon of deities. [information and Image Credit : Old_Prussians, Wikipedia] [Image : 1. Around 1200 AD, the Old Prussians in relation to the Baltic tribes. The borders are rough estimates. 2. Political and tribal division of the 12th-century Old Prussians] [Images Availed Under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (Please Relate to Individual Image URL for More Usage Property)] [License-Link : 1. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en 2. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en ] [Original Source Image URLs : 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baltic_Tribes_c_1200.svg 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_prussians_12th_century.jpg ]
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