The originality of the Agpeya....

    The incorporation of such selected Psalms, Gospels, and prayers into Christian worship was adopted first by the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Thanks to the relative peace that it enjoyed during the first and second centuries, the Egyptian Church, long before any other church, was able to establish the pattern of these canonical hours. Both the structure and the contents of the Coptic Agpeya are the direct descendants of the original Canonical Hours which were used by the cenobite (communal) monasteries which originated in Egypt in the first quarter of the fourth century.