I came up with this story idea some 35 years ago, and have been putting off writing it until recently. I will post chapters as I get them written. The picture was done in Daz Studio. The house ruin and the "light-painting" on the wall were made by me in Shade3d. PREFACE The Discovery of the Codex My name is Dr. George Foster. I’m an archaeologist with Tri-State University. I was on an archaeological dig in Pompeii in the summer of 2006. My team and I were excavating a house in the northeast part of the city, which we named the House of the Light-Paintings. Its walls were decorated with these “Light-Paintings”, which is what various inscriptions around Pompeii called them. They were very realistic black-and-white paintings found in several houses in Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum that looked to the untrained eye like daguerreotype photographs. This house was apparently their source. The occupant of the house, one Timotheus Cassius Atlanticus, made the Light-Paintings and sold them to the wealthier citizens of Pompeii. There were no body casts or bones to be found in the house, which led us to conclude that Atlanticus and whoever else lived in the house with him had escaped the destruction of the city on that fateful day in the 79th year of the Common Era, when the volcano to the north of the city heaved its molten guts onto the city, burying it under a thick blanket of ash and mud. Just behind the atrium we found the tabularium (personal office of the owner of the house). It was a bit larger than they usually were, and had two doors, one that opened into the atrium and the other into the peristylium. In the tabularium, I cleared away the remains of a wooden desk and under it I found an iron trap-door. The hinges and lock had long since rusted away so I carefully lifted the badly rusted lid from its place and set it on the floor next to the hole. Inside were a jar and an iron box. The jar contained some coins and the iron box was locked. The lock on this had fared better than the one on the trap-door. With some effort I managed to pick the unusually sophisticated lock and I opened the box. Inside was a papyrus codex about two inches thick, which struck me as a bit unusual, since I didn’t think codices had been invented until the second century, so I was surprised to find one from the first century. It was somewhat brittle, so I placed it back into the box then my colleagues and I carried the box outside where we placed it into the back of my pickup truck to take back to my apartment, where I would decide later what to do with my find. Back at the apartment, I opened the front cover of the book and read the faded lettering on the first page. It was written in Koine Greek, which was a bit unusual as most surviving literature in Koine is of a religious nature and this was clearly not a religious work. Koine was a colloquial dialect of Greek generally spoken by the lower classes in the Roman Empire and by almost everyone in the eastern part of the Empire. It was used in the writing of the New Testament as well as the pre-Nicene Church Fathers. Some rare examples of secular Koine literature had been found at Oxyrhinchus and a few other places. This codex appeared to be an autobiographical account by Atlanticus, but due to the condition of the codex I decided against attempting to turn the pages. Over the next few weeks, my colleagues and I began the slow and careful but tedious process of preserving the brittle pages which were mostly intact but had become detached from what was left of the binding. The binding was in advance of what might be expected from a first-century codex, but still unable to withstand the ravages of the nearly two millennia that had elapsed since the book was placed into the box. We carefully placed each page into archival sleeves made of netting so that we could still examine the writing without risking damage to the pages. Then as each page was prepared, I placed it under an infra-red lamp I had placed on my kitchen table and began reading the text. My first impression upon reading the first few pages was that the codex might be some cleverly-devised hoax. But if it were a hoax, how would the hoaxster fake the very real aging of the codex. And then there was the problem of getting it into an unexcavated area of Pompeii. No, this was no hoax, as far as I was concerned. As incredible as the story related in the codex seemed, it was real. My colleagues were not so easily convinced, however and thought my belief in its authenticity to be rather funny. So now I place before you, the reader, my translation of this incredible work and leave it up to you to form your own conclusion as to its authenticity.