the shamanistic imagery of the eagle holding a hare in its talons and a fish in its beak and offering them to another eagle is a zoomorphic repreentation of the investiture, with the hare and the fish being symbols of kingship, corresponding to the Iranian political practice of a defeated king having to offer earth and water to his victor the depiction of an eagle with a snake in its beak has a similar meaning During these scenes of royal investiture, the king usually undergoes apotheosis: the king is represented seated on a throne, and holding the royal insignias, which include a bow, a phiale and a rhyton. The throne itself was an attribute of power, and ascending to it contained a motif of conflict: similarly to how the Hittites identified the royal throne with their own Chaos-dragon, the Thracians identified the defeat of the Chaos-dragon with the act of ascending the throne. Representations of this identification are present in Thracian art, such as on a Thracian helmet from Băiceni, where, on one cheekpiece, a snake is depicted coiled under the throne upon which is seated the Hero, who holds a cup and a rhyton in his raised hands and a bow hangs behind his back; and on the other cheekpiece, two dragons are represented on each side of a bull's head, meaning that the Hero's Chaos-dragon enemy was a stealer of bulls. As part of the royal insignia, the bow or the spear represented the warrior function: in Thrace, the bow was the typical weapon of the young warrior and part of the royal insignia given to the prince after he defeated his opponent in the re-enactment of the struggle between the Hero (to whom the king was assimilated) and the Chaos-monster (in myth, the gods' enemies could only be defeated once the hero had joined the fight wielding his bow). The use of the bow as royal insignia was also present among the Iranian peoples, such as the Scythians and the Persians, who hunted using the bow, while it rarely figured on Thracian depictions of hunting scenes. Among the Thracians, the mastery of the bow was necessary for kingship, and the king Cotys I displayed this skill of his to his servants during his symbolic marriage to the goddess Athena. The libation cup, that is the rhyton and the phiale which were used in the royal cult, represented