ABSTRACT
The encyclopedia has been with humankind since the ancient Greeks. Aristotle's works are certainly encyclopedic in nature; that is to say, they encircle particular aspects of knowledge, some extremely specialized, some more general. Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) compiled a thirtyseven-volume encyclopedia of natural science. The largest encyclopedia seems to have been edited by the Emperor of China, Yung Lo, in the fifteenth century. Called the ¥ung Lo Ta Tien, it required 2,169 scholars to write it and ran to 917,480 pages in 11,100 volumes.
