The Egyptian hieroglyphic script is “logo-phonetic.” Some signs represent words, other represent sounds, and others grammatical elements such as pluralization or case.
which is actually very similar to the ideograms of chinese characters in that the ideation is typically in the leading part of the character while the sound is indicated by the following part of the character.
So for example the kanji for oil leads with the three marks associated with the idea of water, and the later half is the character yu which is close to how the word for oil sounds.