With large number of sports and venues, visitors to Olympic Games from other countries sometime have difficulty in learning what is taking place where. Pictographs, first used at the Tokyo Games of 1964, were very helpful in this respect. The pictographs at the Mexico City Games of 1968 employed motifs borrowed from ancient Aztec writing. Those at the Munich Games of 1978 were distinguished by a laconic geometric style. The organizers of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal used a slightly modified variation of the Munich pictographs. Olympic stamps of India and Cyprus reproduced some of these pictographs.

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