| Some pictographs were used as ideographs because they have different semantic meanings. |
| And this in a country where becoming literate means mastering several thousand ideographs, rather than the 26 or so letters of an alphabet! |
| Modern Chinese, a present-day result of this evolutionary direction of a pictographic writing system, has upwards of 50,000 ideographs. |
| Then ten years of school for learning the first thousand Chinese kanji ideographs, with thousands more to go. |
| Later to create more words, symbols were added to pictographs to form ideographs. |
| It seems likely that each of the ideographs was carefully composed before it was engraved. |
