Specialists in Cherokee writing have yet to analyze the findings. William D. Welge, director of research at the Oklahoma Historical Society, who oversees an extensive archive of Cherokee records, said it “was reasonable to think that Sequoyah or one of his students carved these writing symbols.”

Image The syllabary devised by Sequoyah in the early 1800s

Any new findings about Sequoyah, Mr. Welge said, are important because his invention of Cherokee writing promoted rapid strides in education and the culture of one of the largest Native American populations. Some crucial early steps in his development of the script had been lost, the archivist said, because Sequoyah’s wife had destroyed examples of his early efforts, thinking this “the devil’s work.”

Dr. Tankersley was especially intrigued by some petroglyphs carved on the wall alongside the Cherokee characters. He said the glyphs appeared to include ancient Cherokee symbols as well as drawings representing bears, deer and birds.

Dr. Tankersley is a member of the Cherokee Nation who traces his ancestry to Red Bird, the murdered chief once buried in the cave. He said that he was investigating possible links between the traditional glyphs and a few of the symbols in Sequoyah’s script. If a link can be established, he added, the inscription may be “our Rosetta stone, enabling us to see where prehistory meets history.”

Janine Scancarelli, an authority on Cherokee writing formerly at the College of William and Mary, has written, “In their present form many of the syllabary characters resemble Roman, Cyrillic or Greek letters or Arabic numerals, but there is no apparent relationship between their sounds in other languages and in Cherokee.”

By some accounts, Sequoyah was a kind of Professor Henry Higgins who enlisted family members who had sharper ears for discriminating distinct sounds. They helped him divide spoken words into their constituent sounds, and to each sound he assigned a symbol drawn mostly, it is said, from an English spelling book. In the script, for example, Sequoyah’s own name reads:

The 15 characters on the cave wall   do not spell any words. “They read almost like ABCs,” Dr. Tankersley said in the magazine article, suggesting that someone taught by Sequoyah may have been “practicing drawing them out just as we would practice our ABCs.”