Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (34 page)

14
On a piano, these twelve notes are represented by the seven white keys of the major scale (ABCDEFG) plus the five black keys, the sharps and flats of the chromatic scale, that fall between them.

15
At the risk of piling on, I should note that in 2003, a team of researchers that had studied microwave radiation created shortly after the Big Bang published a paper arguing persuasively, according to
The
Economist
, “that the universe is, indeed, a dodecahedron.”

16
Feeling a little uncertain about this conclusion, I again e-mailed Janet Johnson, the Egyptologist at the University of Chicago who’d explained how 900 and 9,000 looked similar. This time, she was unequivocal. “The Egyptians used two different lunar calendars and a solar calendar. The lunar calendars were used for calculating religious festivals. The Egyptians knew very well how to convert from one calendar to another. If an Egyptian priest had said 9,000 years, he would not have meant 9,000 months.”

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