Constructing a stemma, that is a tree-like graph showing the historical relationships between the extant witnesses of a work, may be regarded as a desirable or even indispensable aspect of textual criticism. Nevertheless, its construction is often a daunting task, especially in the case of textual traditions that span across several centuries and over a vast area. When a work has been handed down in dozens or even hundreds of exemplars, the factors which normally obscure the history of the transmission of any text are likely to be amplified by the sheer bulk of available data and the difficulties in their organisation and analysis. These factors essentially amount, as is well-known, to either horizontal contamination —i.e. the propagation of innovative features such as interpolations, reformulations, etc., across lines of transmission, as may happen for example when a copyist has two or more mss of varied ancestry before him— or parallelism, namely, the fact that the same new characters may independently appear in different branches of the tradition.

In the chapter on “Methods and results”, it was pointed out that instances of both contamination and parallelism abound in the available mss of the initial section of the KV (and presumably, also in later sections), thus suggesting that the text has had an intricate history, which might turn out to be simply impossible to reconstruct in detail. In other words, building a stemma of the extant mss appears to be a formidable, if not impossible, challenge.