It's an unfortunate fact of museology that archaeological collections from before the 1960s have terrible records. Many did not originate from systematic excavations, but from miscellaneous private donors. Those that did come from excavations often came in bulk, leaving museum staff to handle cataloging of material they may not have been familiar with- or was simply too numerous to dedicate any time to properly handle them. As new research brings in new collections, old collections can collect dust in the back. Unless, by chance, a small partial object like this is useful for a reseracher's narrow interests, it will never get much study.

Now, your object has been in the museum long enough that I was able to find a reference to it in a 1968 publication on lapis lazuli in Egypt. The article lists 50 different lapis artifacts from the pre- and proto- dynastics periods: carved pendants, a model mace, vase bases, beads, statuettes, and two instances of "gold and lapis tube, perhaps a spoon handle." One is yours, from Gebel Tarif; the other comes from grave 1247 at the expansive predynastic cemeteries of Naqada (image, from Breivik 2013). There's one more reference, in this 1904 catalog of objects at the Cairo Museum as artifact 14517. The entry mentions that the sloped gold edge was cut off and adds that it was found at Gebel Tarif either in 1896, or was acquired in 1896. This confirms what the objects counterpart from Naqada suggests: that the Cairo example is only half of the original artifact. This one seems to be the bottom end of the handle, since it tapers off.

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Is this object "odd?" Hardly.

Most any museum will tell you that gold was used in the Predynastic Period. The Oriental Institue in Chicago has put out an excellent volume on their early Egyptian material- it's a great resource if you want to get more familiar with the period.

Gold objects in the Predynastic did remain relatively simple, and rare. The majority are beads or simple bracelets. More complex objects, like this gold-covered figure were crafted from a base material with gold sheet pounded over it, usually wood or a precious stone (e.g. lapis lazuli). Sometimes the gold sheet itself was crafted into a simple shape. As with so much of collected archaeological material, these gold artifacts largely come from cemeteries like those at Abydos, Gerzeh, Naqada, or Qustul. There is a definite association between gold objects and other high status goods, especially those that would have been imported from the Levant, Mesopotamia, or elsewhere.

While the lapis lazuli in this object was likely imported, the gold would have come from the eastern deserts of Upper Egypt. The vicinity of Naqada and Hierakonpolis to the gold-rich land between the Nile and the Red Sea may account for their early political preeminence. Compositional analysis of gold objects from the Predynastic period and first dynasities indicates that gold was mostly acquired from veins embedded in quartz outcrops that would have been highly visible in the desert terrain or from placer gold accumulated in dry wadi riverbeds. Quartz veins were easily seperated from their matrix after smashing with heavy hammers, such as these (Klemm & Klemm, 1999). There is evidence that pit mining began in Predynastic times at sites like Wadi Dara and Umm Elegia, where miners followed quartz veins underground. Placer mining, the predominant technique in much of the world well into the early Modern era and the type we usually associated with prospectors in the North American west, used water to seperated the smaller flakes and nuggets of pure gold that had been seperated from the ground by erosion. Unfortunately, reserach at ancient mining site is difficult in any setting because mining is an inherently destructive process and because the same sites are revisited at later periods.

Though metal objects are only so common in the Predynastic, they were hardly unusual and it's clear that a strong metalworking tradition existed leading into the historical era. It should be noted that we see the origins of coppersmithing and at least one instance of working meteroric iron during this period as well.

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Bard, Kathryn A. 1994. “The Egyptian Predynastic: A Review of the Evidence.” Journal of Field Archaeology 21 (3): 265–88.

Breivik, Karoline Hareide. 2013. “Comparative Analysis of Early Bronze Age Burials - A Study in Burial Customs in Upper Egypt, Lower Nubia and the Sinai Desert,” May.

Klemm, Dietrich, Rosemarie Klemm, and Andreas Murr. 2001. “Gold of the Pharaohs – 6000 Years of Gold Mining in Egypt and Nubia.” Journal of African Earth Sciences, African Renaissance and Geosciences, 33 (3): 643–59.

Klemm, Rosemarie, and Dietrich Klemm. 2012. Gold and Gold Mining in Ancient Egypt and Nubia: Geoarchaeology of the Ancient Gold Mining Sites in the Egyptian and Sudanese Eastern Deserts. Springer Science & Business Media.

Payne, Joan Crowfoot. 1968. “Lapis Lazuli in Early Egypt.” IRAQ 30 (1): 58–61.

Rehren, Thilo, Tamás Belgya, Albert Jambon, György Káli, Zsolt Kasztovszky, Zoltán Kis, Imre Kovács, et al. 2013. “5,000 Years Old Egyptian Iron Beads Made from Hammered Meteoritic Iron.” Journal of Archaeological Science 40 (12): 4785–92.

University of Chicago, and Emily Teeter, eds. 2011. Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization. Oriental Institute Museum Publications 33. Chicago, Ill: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.