The Agpeya orders the Coptic day around the verse the tradition takes as its charter, seven times a day I praise you, from Psalm 119. Its hours follow the ancient reckoning: the First Hour at dawn, giving thanks for the resurrection and the new day; the Third Hour, recalling the descent of the Holy Spirit; the Sixth Hour, the crucifixion; the Ninth Hour, the death of Christ; the Eleventh Hour, or Vespers, and the Twelfth Hour, or Compline, closing the day with thoughts of its end; and the Midnight Prayer, divided into three watches, kept most fully by monastics.
An additional office, the Prayer of the Veil, belongs to monks and clergy. Each hour is built to one pattern: opening prayers with the Lord's Prayer and the Prayer of Thanksgiving, Psalm 50 of the Septuagint numbering, a block of psalms proper to the hour, a Gospel reading, a set of short litanies, repeated petitions with Kyrie eleison, and a concluding prayer and absolution. The psalmody is the book's substance; the Agpeya distributes a large portion of the psalter across the daily round, so that a Copt who keeps the hours prays the psalms continually. The book is deliberately self-contained, requiring no priest and no church, which is what fitted it to become, alongside its liturgical use, the standard manual of personal prayer for Coptic laity of every age.