The Most Ancient Greek Manuscripts of the Ladder of John Climacus
The Byzantine hand written tradition of the Ladder of Divine Ascent has poorly been studied. The first step in this direction should be the systematic description of all surviving Greek manuscripts of this book. According to the counting of the author, not less than 511 Greek manuscripts from the eighth to the nineteenth century with text of the Ladder were kept. This article is dedicated to the 35 most ancient books, dated from 8th to 10th century. The most ancient Greek manuscripts of the Ladder are available in the libraries of not less than 8 countries (Italy, Greece, Egypt, Russia, England, Germany, France and Israel (Jerusalem)