Fixed daily psalmody was an Egyptian invention before it was anyone else's inheritance, and the Agpeya is its direct descendant in the church that started it. The monks of fourth-century Egypt, Antony's hermits and Pachomius's communities, made the recitation of psalms in course the engine of their life, and travellers like John Cassian carried the Egyptian pattern to the West, where it became the foundation of the Latin office.
In Egypt itself the pattern hardened into the seven hours the Agpeya still keeps: the First Hour on waking, with its morning thanksgiving; the Third, remembering the descent of the Spirit; the Sixth, the hour of the crucifixion; the Ninth, the hour of the death; the Eleventh, Vespers, at the lamp-lighting; the Twelfth, Compline, before sleep; and the Midnight Prayer in three watches, kept fully in the monasteries and in part by the devout. Each hour has the same anatomy: the Lord's Prayer, the prayer of thanksgiving, Psalm 51, then the hour's own block of psalms, a Gospel passage matched to the hour's theme, a chain of short litanies, the repeated Kyrie eleison, said forty-one times on the knuckle-counted measure of a Coptic rosary of prayer, and a closing absolution. The distribution is generous: the Agpeya assigns most of the psalter across the day, so a Copt who keeps the full cycle recites nearly the whole book of Psalms daily, exactly as the desert intended seventeen centuries ago.