New artifact with an invoke power of identification, which is interesting because it is useful in the early game and gets less important later on.

The base item type could be a blank spellbook or a scroll of identify (not a spellbook of identify, because then you just have the spell).

If implemented as a scroll, reading the scroll would either be special-cased not to disappear (possibly giving the same effect as invoking it, subject to the same invoke timeout), or it would give a powerful one-time identification effect such as a full inventory ID and then disappear.