First was the reassembling of the imperial library collection after its great losses through war. Second, a planned codifying of knowledge by commissioning huge compendia, encyclopaedic compilations containing a vast amount of material from earlier literature, much of it thought lost. Third was a crucial technological change: the transition from manuscript culture to the age of print – a change that only began in the West with Gutenberg, Aldus Manutius and Caxton in the fifteenth century.
