The Liturgy of Christian Egypt

Egypt gave Christianity its monasticism, and the Coptic Rite is what a national liturgy looks like when the desert sets the tone. Services are long and are sung throughout in a chant tradition handed down orally by generations of blind cantors, accompanied by the small cymbals and triangle that are the rite's signature sound. The eucharistic liturgy opens with the offering of the lamb, the chosen loaf marked with crosses, and proceeds through readings that always include a portion from the Acts of the Apostles and the life of a saint from the Synaxarium, to an anaphora served behind the curtained sanctuary.

The church's year is ordered by the Calendar of the Martyrs, which counts from the accession of Diocletian in 284, the emperor whose persecution cut so deeply into Egyptian memory that the church dated time itself from it. Fasting is the rite's other great mark: the Copts keep more fasting days than any other Christian communion, including the long fasts of Advent and the Apostles and the strict Great Lent, with abstention from all animal products. Coptic itself, the direct descendant of the language of the pharaohs written in Greek letters, survives almost entirely inside this liturgy, so that every celebration of the rite is also the sounding of the oldest continuously spoken thread of the Egyptian tongue.