is the Classical border of acanthus leaves and Buddhist skulls painted along the inferior border of the mural. The word Rumakama, or Romakam appears in the Kizil paintings as well as in the later Tibetan document, and is thought to refer to a painter who came from the Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire. Period 2: "New school" with bolder style (circa 400–500 CE) Following the earliest "Classical" style of the paintings at Kizil, which was especially elegant and "painterly", with sophisticated shading of the bodies to express sculptural volume, a new school appears with the Cave of the Statues, with works such as the "Cowherd Nanda", which is much bolder, using intense colors (but still limited to browns, greens and oranges), thicker lines and simpler patterns, somewhat like "colored drawings". This style is thought to be derived from the confluence of Hellenistic, Iranian and Indian influences under the Kushans, and its main center of creation was at Bamiyan, which became "a kind of parent monastery for the settlement of monks in Central Asia". This evolution in style is accompanied by a change in the main themes being portrayed. In the Classical period the story of the life of the Buddha and numerous Jataka tales took center stage. Now the main accent is on the sermons of the Buddha, which typically cover the walls of the main cella, together with the appearance of side and rear corridors in which are pictured the events of the death of the Buddha, the Parinirvana. Rhie attributes the sudden variations of styles at Kizil, without much signs of internal evolution (especially in the early stages), to the sudden arrival of new groups of artists from other regions, bringing their own artistic idioms and techniques. This period is also marked by the appearance of the self-portraits of painters in long tunics and highboots armed with short daggers, such as the painter of the Cave of the Statues or the several painters of the "Cave of the Painters", with often their own identifying labels in Sanskrit. The clothing style and type of these painters has often been described as Sasanian, but has recently been proposed as being rather Hephthalite, due to the similarities with the Hephthalite figures in Dilberjin Tepe, Balalyk Tepe or Bamiyan, and because the Hepthalites did control the Tarim Basin for nearly a century around this time period. "Cave of the statues" (Cave