Images as the Text: Pictographs and Pictographic Logic: Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann propose a logical system for pictographic languages. A true pictograph functions as an image whose meaning is communicated through its visual form as a picture of something, whether the communication is effected through substitution or translation into language or not. Historically speaking, we know of very few fully developed pictographic systems. Ancient writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian pictographic precursors to cuneiform, Hittite hieroglyphics, and other scripts in the ancient near east, used pictorial forms but usually in what are known as "mixed" systems. The pictographic representation of an animal, object, or person functioned as a sign in a system that also used ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and phonetic principles to represent concepts, words, or sounds. Mixed systems are also characteristic of the new world languages and writing systems from mesoamerica, such as Mayan and Aztec glyphs. Many of these systems used the sign in multiple ways (so that, for instance, the rebus of an eye would be readable as "I", as the concept "to see", and so forth).