On the Antiquities of Prussia

...they were attacked by war, but by redeeming themselves with a great quantity of that very thing for which they sensed they were being sought—namely, amber—they remained unmolested. But let us speak here in passing about amber, for this coast, which is as if a peninsula due to the winding curves of the sea and the land stretching spaciously into the straits, abounds with it, where it is carried by the force of storms. This was once called Glessum by the Germans, as the learned have left in writing. Hence, the region itself was named Glessaria by the Roman military, and by others Subaria from the bark, while it is called Sudinia by its native name. By the learned, it is called Austrasia. The barbarians also call amber "Sualternicum" in the Scythian tongue. But writers do not agree on where in the world amber is produced. For besides the things that have been fabled about it in the story of Phaëthon, Pitheas says that there is an estuary by the name of Metonomon belonging to the Gotthones, a people of Germany, six thousand stadia from the ocean; that an island called Abalu is a day's journey away from this; and that amber is brought from that island by spring tides and is the refuse of a congealed sea. He says the inhabitants use it for firewood and sell it to the nearby Teuthones. Thimaeus agrees with this, but he called the island Basilia. Nitias, however, wished for it to be the sap of the sun's rays, and believed that these, having been driven more violently toward the earth around sunset, leave a thick sweat on that part of the ocean, which is then thrown onto the shores of Germany by the swelling sea. Mithridates asserts that there is an island on the shores of Germany, and that it is called Cedron, wooded with a type of cedar, from which it flows down into the rocks. Cornelius Tacitus [writes that] the Aestui...