also landowners and priest-kings, with the supremacy of the Thracian rulers being based on the dual principle of the priest-king. Therefore, the warrior initiation an important part of the Thracian royal customs, most especially the trial of the hunt, and both Thracian and Macedonian art depicted hunters on horseback, denoting the hunt as an aristocratic tradition. Hence, the Thracian Hero was commonly depicted as a mounted hunter whose opponents included the lion, the bear, the wolf, and the panther, all animals considered to be "royal" and whose hunting skills the initiates could learn from; thus, their defeat by the hunter brought him glory and the animal's powers passed on to him. The main rival of a Thracian prince aspiring to be king was the wild boar, who held a special symbolic status and represented the Indo-European god of war since, like the wild warrior initiate, it was an undifferentiated animal, being both herbivorous and predatory, land-dwelling but preferring marshes and swamps, and therefore a borderline creature existing at the threshold of the wild and the domesticated, which made it a fitting symbol of Chaos, where all attributes and qualities are undifferentiated. The boar was also a symbol of death, and therefore the struggle between the animal and the Hero represented the struggle to protect life itself, that is the life of the people, the prince, and the royal line. The hunt was therefore, for Thracian princes, not only a trial of initiation, but also one of consecration, and if they failed it they would die and never become king. and their dynasty would end. The royal investiture Once the Thracian king had completed his initiation and trials, he was given insignia of power visible on depictions of royal investiture, which were themselves derived from Near Eastern artistic motifs depicting the investiture of kings. All these investiture scenes have the same common theme: the prince becomes a king only by the god's will: a representation of the royal investiture is visible on the plate of the Brezovo gold ring, where the goddess is represented about to give a rhyton to a horseman towards her on the Rosovets ring, the goddess is walking leftwards and is followed by a horseman holding a rhyton she has just given him on a greave from Agighiol, a warrior is represented offering a rhyton and an eagle to a horseman who has already received a bow