INTRODUCTION

During Winter 2004-2005 (December 11^th, 2004 – January 19^th, 2005) the activities of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Luxor mainly concentrated on the subterranean part of the Tomb of Harwa (TT 37), where three funerary shafts were excavated. Two (YE and YF) are located in the Second Pillared Hall. The third (YN) was discovered last summer, during clearing of the debris from the southwest part of the corridor surrounding the first subterranean level. Conservation work was conducted in the vestibule of the tomb. All the antiquities stored there by the Archaeological Mission of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in the 1920s had been moved to the storerooms of the Supreme Council of Antiquities last summer.
A team of epigraphers from the Archaeological Italian Mission to Luxor also worked in the Tomb of Pabasa following an agreement with Dr. Mohammed El-Soghair and Dr. Mahmud Abd El-Rasek. They continued the recording of the blocks stored in the room XB, completed and verified the copies of the texts engraved in the pillars of the pillared room and started to copy some other texts in the courtyard.
The campaign ran simultaneously with the exhibition, “L’enigma di Harwa. Alla scoperta di un capolavoro del rinascimento egizio” (Palazzo Bricherasio, Torino, December 14^th 2004 – January 23^rd 2005) and was connected to a website (www.anticoegitto.org), where a daily journal of the activities of the mission was kept. Anyone interested could follow the progress of the excavations from the exhibition (where two computers connected to the internet had been placed) or from home. This was intended as an experiment aimed to provide a realistic picture of the activities of an archaeological mission in Egypt.
As a final part of the mission’s activities nearly thirty tombs of Theban officials, most of which are unopen to the public, were photographed. The mission aims to publish a book on the private necropolis of Thebes. 

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