how Orpheus was depicted as an incomparable singer because his cultural reform was codified in chanted poems similar to the Greek Iliad. This use of song and dance by the Thracians to preserve their historical, ideological, and religious beliefs is attested by how the high priests of the Getae welcomed the Macedonian army by singing and playing lyres, the Scytho-Thracian Agathyrsi memorised their laws in the form of chants, and Thracian healers used incantations as a cure for the soul. The Thracian epic songs which are known include a song and dance of and the song of , which honoured both the Thracian Hero 's local form named and the Odrysian king Sitalces, who had been assimilated to the hero. Therefore, the Thracians' Greek neighbours associated them so strongly with song that Greek myth described Thrace as a country from which hailed great musicians and singers such as Linus, Orpheus, Thamyris, and Musaeus. Animal sacrifice , in his form of , was believed to have to suffer since he represented fertility, the rejuvenation of nature and the flowering of life. Therefore, in an annual ritual held every February, a bull representing was sacrificed and torn to pieces, and its bloody flesh, standing for 's own flesh, was consumed by the participants. After rituals of sacred ploughing and sowing were enacted, was summoned through a prayer, and she was believed to bring her son back to life in the form of a ram, a he-goat, or a male black lamb, as the incarnation of the male principle renewed, and the reborn Zagreus was represented as a male youth wearing seven ram skins. Like their Scythian neighbours, the Thracians practised horse sacrifices to the "Arean" , to present kings as victors, or as pledges to the god in exchange of his protection. These horse sacrifices also find parallels among the ancient Indo-Aryans in the form of the Ashvamedha ritual, and similarly to how the Purushamedha human sacrifice was an alternative to the Ashvamedha horse sacrifice among the Indo-Aryans, the horse could be substituted by a human in the Thracian sacrificial rite. Representations of the horse sacrifice and its substitutability with human sacrifice are found in Thracian art in the plaques from the Letnitsa Treasure, where horse and human heads are represented behind the mounted warrior-god /the Thracian Hero. Human sacrifice The Getae believed that allowed himself to be contacted only through a