Cahiers de linguistique - Asie orientale - Année 1994 - Volume 23 - Numéro 1 - Pages 349-363This article is to illustrate how artifacts served as referents in the formation of Chinese archaic ideopictographs. The identification of an artifact in an ideopictograph (or pictograph) can be extremely difficult if the former has long become obsolete, or if its graphic image in the script has been subject to serious morphological simplification, distortion or erosion. In such cases, misinterpretations and wild guesses flourish and, consequently, controversies are inevitable. I shall discuss here two examples which have eluded till now the analysis of paleographers, both China and abroad. 15 pages Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.