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Old Cherokee script found in a cave

Many schoolchildren in the United States learn about the famous Sequoyah, a man of the Cherokee tribe, who watched English-speaking people read books and thought it would be a good idea to have such a way of communicating Cherokee. He did not read English himself, but used the idea of literacy and some letters from our alphabet to create a system for his mother's native language. His father was an English fur trader who named the boy George Gist or Guess, but this son is better known to most of us as Sequoyah, inventor of the so-called “Cherokee alphabet.”

This is not actually an alphabet but a syllabary, in which each symbol represents a syllable. Some of the symbols stand for vowels, which is like some of the letters in an alphabet. But there is only one simple consonant, the “s” sound (written with a variation on a capital "U" with a curve right end, and a small "o" attached on the left). All the other consonant sounds are followed by a vowel sound. So there is one symbol for “ga,” another for “ge,” another for “gi,” one for “go,” one for “gu,” and one for “gv,” which seems to represent the schwa sound we use in the first syllable of “above.” Altogether, there are 85 symbols in this system of writing, many of them either identical to English letters or similar to them, but others quite different and invented by Sequoyah himself.

 The interesting thing is that an archeologist who is fond of exploring caves has found some characters cut into the wall of a cave in southeastern Kentucky at a place that was sacred to the Cherokee.  It was holy because it was the traditional burial site of particularly revered chief (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/science/23cherokee.html?_r=2&ei=&hp=&ex=&part... ). This discoverer, Dr. Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati, was able to identify 15 characters from the Cherokee syllabary on the wall, but there are other signs, more difficult to make out, also. There is a date as well, either 1818 or 1808, but the wall was cut into more than once, so the middle number is hard to determine accurately. In the photograph on the above website, the two “8’s” are clear enough, though not chalked in, but the other numbers are very obscure.

 

The history of Sequoyah’s invention is a fascinating topic for many reasons. For one thing, writing systems usually emerge anonymously and slowly, the result of many hands and minds. For another, it is known that Sequoyah himself made more than one attempt before he settled on his final version of the syllabary. One account indicated that he started out with a much more elaborate version which was more like hieroglyphics, in which each symbol represented a different word.  In this account, he finally burned all his manuscripts in disgust, considering the system too unwieldy. The article above notes that his wife opposed his attempt, too, considering it a work of the devil, and destroyed other evidence of the history of the script's development. These acts make the discovery of the carvings in the cave especially valuable to historians and those who love to puzzle over unusual scripts.  Sequoyah is known to have begun work on his script in 1809 so, depending on the date of the cave's inscription, it may be the earliest extant writing in Cherokee.

 Have a look at the photo of the cave wall and at the "alphabet" (or syllabary) provided on the above website.  Then, for kicks, try writing your own name in Cherokee syllables.  The Word Geek's first name -- depending on pronunciation -- might be spelled with a backward J + T + R + and O with a horizontal line across the middle.  The idea is to go by sound, how the word is pronounced, not by how it's written in English.  Once that's done, you might try cracking the "code" on the cave.  The Word Geek is pretty sure she sees "na" in the inscription a couple of times, and "v" on the left, next to what might possibly be a schematic fish (unless it isn't).  Perhaps there is a "tsi" or "tso next to one of those "na" symbols.  It's possible there's a "hna" in there, up above, too.  But most of it was pretty tough to match up with the modern syllabary.  Still, it was great fun.

Readers with a subscription and thus access to Archaeology magazine, and Dr. Tankersley's article with details and and interpretation are cordially invited to full us all in.