The Dnieper Balts were a subgroup of the Balts, that lived in the Dnieper river basin for millennia until the Late Middle Ages, when they were partly destroyed and partly assimilated by the Slavs by the 13th century. To the north and northeast of the Dnieper Balts were the Volga Finns, and to the southeast and south were the ancient Iranians, the Scythians. The Dnieper Balts were studied by many researchers, such as Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga, German linguist Max Vasmer, and Russian linguists Vladimir Toporov, and Oleg Trubachyov. History In the early 20th century, the Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga showed that essentially all names in the upper Nemunas and upper Dnieper basins were Baltic. In 1962, the Russian linguists Vladimir Toporov and Oleg Trubachyov, in their work, the "Linguistic analysis of the hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper region" (), demonstrated that more than a thousand names in the Dnieper basin were of Baltic origin, due to their morphology and etymology. The former ethnic Balticness of the Dnieper basin is evidenced by numerous archaeological finds, as well as hydronyms. For example, the hydronyms Yauza, and Moskva, are of Baltic origin according to Toporov. In the late Bronze Age, the Balts lived in territories from what is now the western border of Poland to the Ural Mountains. However, some propose a smaller territory of Baltic inhabitation from the Vistula in the west to at least as far as Moscow in the east and as far south as Kyiv. Ancient history Various archeological monuments and the prevalence of Baltic hydronyms indicate that by the end of the Neolithic period (), there were several closely related, at least hypothetically Baltic, cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, which were the Pamariai, (Late) Narva, and (Late) Nemunas cultures. The earliest of them is the Pamariai culture, which covered only a narrow part of the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. During the Bronze () and Iron () Ages, in the lands to the east and south of modern-day Lithuania and Latvia, there were Baltic (Late) Narva and the Brushed Pottery cultures (the areas of these two cultures included the east of present-day Lithuania and Latvia), the , Milograd, and the later Dyakovo cultures. In the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, the aforementioned Baltic cultures of the Dnieper, Daugava and Oka basins transformed into the Kolochin, and Moshchiny cultures, which existed until the 8th–10th centuries. This