Fixed-hour prayer entered Christian history through Egypt. The monastic movements of the fourth century, the hermits of the desert and the communities organized under Pachomius, built their lives on the continual recitation of psalms, and the church's daily offices everywhere descend in some measure from that Egyptian discipline.
The Agpeya is the Coptic Church's own descent from it, the desert office domesticated into a book. Its name derives from the Coptic word for hour, and its contents, overwhelmingly psalmody with Gospel readings and litanies, keep the old monastic proportions in a way that even the Byzantine and Latin books, enriched with centuries of hymnography, do not. The book's modern life is inseparable from the Coptic revival of the twentieth century.
The Sunday School movement and a renewed monasticism put the Agpeya into lay hands as a daily rule, printed cheaply in Coptic and Arabic and now in the languages of the diaspora; a Coptic family in Cairo, Sydney or New Jersey is likely to own several copies, and mobile applications have joined the printed book without displacing it. Clergy pray its hours as preparation for the liturgy, and the faithful are encouraged toward whatever portion of the round their day allows, the First Hour on waking and Compline before sleep being the common minimum. Among the world's books of hours the Agpeya is distinctive for how little it has needed to change: the church that began fixed-hour prayer still prays substantially the office its desert gave it.