By Eric A. Powel
In 1819, Cherokee silversmith George Gist—better known as Sequoyah—completed work on the Cherokee syllabary, a written script in which each character represents a syllable. By 1825, most Cherokee had adopted the system and Sequoyah was hailed as a folk hero for inventing the first Native American system of writing in North America. Now University of Cincinnati archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley has discovered that Cherokee characters engraved alongside petroglyphs in a southeastern Kentucky cave are the earliest known examples of Sequoyah’s syllabary, dating back to 1818, or perhaps even earlier.
Tankersley, a member of the Cherokee Nation and Piqua Shawnee tribes, found the characters in a cave sacred to Native Americans as the burial place of Red Bird, a prominent Cherokee chief who was tomahawked to death in 1796 by two white men in a fur trading dispute. Red Bird was known to have created some of the petroglyphs in the cave, which include abstract ancient symbols as well as glyphs representing bears, bats, deer, and birds.
Sequoyah had relatives who lived near the cave and he taught the syllabary to Cherokee boys studying at a local school called the Choctaw Academy. “It’s likely that Sequoyah would have visited the cave at some point to pay respects to Red Bird,” says Tankersley. “We also know that he visited caves for inspiration while he was working on his syllabary, and that he incorporated rock-art motifs into the system.”
The earliest writing in the system developed by the Cherokee known as Sequoyah has been found in a Kentucky cave. (Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C./Art Resource)
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