Cherokee syllabary

This is one of the things that impressed me about the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.  It is on the ceiling of a hall that is patterned after the Parthenon, the Greek temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. 

The characters inscribed on this skylight represent the Cherokee syllabary.  In the early 1800s a Cherokee Indian from East Tennessee, Sequoyah, invented this phonetic writing system.  Sequoyah realized that if the history and identity of the Cherokee people were to survive, a written language was needed.   The sounds of the Cherokee language were distilled to 85 symbols.

By bringing them into this hall, an undisputed icon of Western culture and achievement, the artist, Lumbar Baumgarten, has proposed an end to the exclusion of one culture by another and to spurious claims of cultural superiority.  It honors Sequoyah’s place in American history in the spirit of considering all people as part of a single society.

This (below) isn't the hall where the syllabary is, but the one next to it. It shows the context in which the symbols are added.  Among other things, a cast (copy) of the doors to St. John the Baptist Church in Firenze are there.