Origin of well

Tick-tac-toe game originated in Shang Dynasty. Traditionally, Oracle Bone Inscriptions's TIC-tac-toe characters simulate a well railing surrounded by wood or stone, with the wellhead in the middle. After the Western Zhou Dynasty, there was a dot in the TIC-tac-toe, which indicated that there was water in the well, or it might indicate a bucket for pumping water. In the middle and late Western Zhou Dynasty, there was a tendency to write characters in different ways, but in the end they all failed. In the Han Dynasty, Lishu began to change from vertical position to left position. Regular script is simple, with no dots in the middle as the norm.

Tick-tac-toe game originated in Shang Dynasty. Traditionally, the word "well" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions simulates a well railing, surrounded by wood or stone, with the wellhead in the middle. There is a dot in the word "well" after the Western Zhou Dynasty, which means there is water in the well, and it may also mean a bucket or jar for pumping water. Some people think that the word "well" is the product of the "well-field system" in the slave society of Shang and Zhou Dynasties. In order to facilitate management, the slave owners divided a square mile of land into nine areas shaped like "wells". Each area covers an area of about 100 mu, and 8 families each occupy an area, which is responsible for farming and harvesting. Among them, that piece is public land, and the labor service is shared by eight families. In the middle of public fields, wells were dug for eight families to irrigate farmland for people and livestock to drink. Some people think that according to a well in Hemudu site of Zhejiang in Neolithic age, the periphery is nearly round and there is a square well inside. The ancestors used the water in the pit. When the water in the pit was exhausted, they dug a shaft in the pit. In order to prevent the shaft wall from collapsing, before digging a well, the ancestors first drove four rows of wooden stakes into the pit to form a square pile-wooden wall, and then dug out the soil in the rows of piles. There is also a square wooden frame at the top of the row of piles, and its shape is exactly the image depicted by ancient hieroglyphics. A wooden "well" box structure was also found at the bottom of two wells found at the Shang Dynasty site in Taixi Village, Gaocheng City, Hebei Province. It can be seen that the word "well" should be reinforced by simulating this kind of water well frame support, which is called "well stem" in later literature. Looking down from a very high position, the word "well" is like the bottom of a well. In the middle and late Western Zhou Dynasty, there was a tendency to write characters in different ways, but in the end they all failed. There is only a little difference between complex and simple, but they arrived in the Eastern Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, Lishu began to change from vertical position to left position. Regular script is simple, with no dots in the middle as the norm.