Signs for hunger, thirst, supplication, and so forth, among both Innuit Indian and ancient Egypt - as indeed many other peoples, both in the old world and the new, whose writing has not reached a purely phonetic state - have that correspondence to be expected when things common to all men are graphically represented. An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms. Pictography is a form of writing which uses representational, pictorial drawings, similarly to cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphic writing, which also uses drawings as phonetic letters or determinative rhymes.