Two Indian archaeologists are being sent to Kabul to study a "begging bowl" thought to have been used by Buddha, in a first step to bringing the artefact back to India.
The huge stone vessel, weighing nearly 400 kilograms, is displayed at the National Museum of Afghanistan and is regarded as important in the Buddhist religion.
The experts will examine the piece after demands in the national parliament last year for the return of the bowl, which the state-run Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) believes belongs to India.
"They will examine if the raw material has been sourced locally from one of the Afghan cities," ASI additional director general BR Mani told AFP late on Monday.
"If not, it will strengthen our claim that it belongs to us."
The ASI says its historical documents and research suggests Buddha donated the bowl, which is 1.75 metres in diameter, to the people of Vaishali, a Buddhist pilgrimage site in the eastern Indian state of Bihar.
A king who ruled northern India and other parts of Asia in the second century took the bowl to what is now Peshawar in Pakistan, before it was moved to what is now Kandahar in Afghanistan, the ASI's research shows.
The bowl was then believed to have been moved to the Kabul museum during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
"In Buddhist monasteries such huge stone troughs used to be kept at the entrance gates as donation bowls. This bowl was also perhaps used similarly," Mani said.
The greenish-grey granite bowl has a lotus flower chiselled around its base, suggesting its Buddhist past.
The bowl was later inscribed along its rim with rows of Arabic verses from the Koran, Mani says.
The Taliban destroyed monumental Buddha statues carved into a hill in Bamiyan province in 2001.
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