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“Water and salt are the enemy for these monuments,” said Brett McClain, a senior epigrapher at the Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, which has been documenting the inscriptions at Medinet Habu for nearly a century.

The stone bore a Khmer epigraphic inscription that included the date for the Khmer year 605, reckoned within the Hindu Saka system, a historical calendar based on the rule of the Indian emperor Shalivahana.

Historians, journalists and others have variously identified the symbol’s birthplace as the Andes mountains of South America, the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the surface of a calculating board in the Tang dynasty of China, a cast iron column and temple inscriptions in India, and most recently, a stone epigraphic inscription found in Cambodia.

But because many of the Ghazni marbles in the Italian database are epigraphic, they can be identified by the writing unique to each of them.

Lot 104, an “important epigraphic panel with interlacings from the palace of Mas’ud III,” was dated to the 12th century, from the capital of the Ghaznavid Empire, in what is today Afghanistan.