[3][4] At the time of its purchase, the knife handle was alleged by the seller to have been found at the site of Gebel el-Arak, but it is today believed to come from Abydos.

The Gebel el-Arak knife was bought for the Louvre by the philologist and Egyptologist Georges Aaron Bénédite in February 1914 from a private antique dealer, M. Nahman, in Cairo.

On 16 March 1914, he wrote to Charles Boreux, then head of the département des Antiquités égyptiennes of the Louvre, about the item the unsuspecting dealer had offered him.

At the top of the hunting scene [...] the hunter wears a large Chaldean garment: he head is covered by a hat like that of our Gudea [...] and he grasps two lions standing against him.

[1] At the time of its purchase by Bénédite, the knife handle was said by the dealer to have been found at the site of Gebel el-Arak (جبل العركى), a plateau near the village of Nag Hammadi, 40 kilometres (25 mi) south of Abydos.

He wrote: [...] the seller did not suspect that the flint [blade] belonged with the handle and presented it to me as witness of the recent finds from Abydos.

[1] That the knife did indeed originate from Abydos is supported by the otherwise total absence of archaeological finds from Gebel el-Arak, while intensive excavations by Émile Amélineau, Flinders Petrie, Édouard Naville and Thomas Eric Peet were taking place at this time at the Umm el-Qa'ab, the necropolis of predynastic and early dynastic rulers in Abydos.

Chert is widely available in Egypt and appears across the archaeological record as a material in lithic tool usage from the Paleolithic up to the New Kingdom.

[15] The blade weights 92.3 grams, its precise dimensions are as follows: The handle is made of the ivory of an elephant tusk, and not from a hippopotamus canine tooth as was first thought.

[2][26][7] Similar portraits of men with beards and torus-like headgear also appear on numerous figurines of the Naqada I period and dated to 3800-3400 BCE.

Another knife with very similar iconography, including depictions of warriors, prisoners and nearly identical types of ships can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Accession number: 26.241.1).

[46] Some of the figures found in Hierakonpolis, or the enemies of the Bull Palette, also dated to the same period, show similarities, such as the penile sheath worn by men.