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Sequoyah

Sequoyah

1770 CE1843 CE · Cherokee country

Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith and craftsman who created a writing system for the Cherokee language. Working alone over roughly a decade, he devised a syllabary of some eighty-six characters, each standing for a syllable, which he completed around 1821. The Cherokee Nation adopted it in 1825, and literacy spread so rapidly that the Nation soon published its own newspaper and books in Cherokee. His achievement is one of the few documented cases of an individual devising a writing system from scratch. He died in 1843.

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Cherokee country

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

In Cherokee country at the same time

John Ross (Guwisguwi)

See other sages who lived in Cherokee country

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Sequoyah’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

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