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 thirty-seven-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 Yung Lo Ta Tien, it required 2,169 scholars to write it and ran to 917,480 pages in 11,100 volumes.