The reconstruction of the copy history of manuscript texts is largely similar to that of DNA, which is why phylogenetic approaches have been adopted (Robinson and O'Hara, 1996;Robinson et al., 1998;van Reenen et al., 1996;van Reenen et al., 2004;Spencer et al., 2004;Roos and Heikkilä, 2009;Roelli and Bachmann, 2010;Andrews and Macé, 2013).
the main goal of the philological work on ancient manuscripts is not the reconstruction of the copy history but compiling an edition of a historical text.