Antony did not invent asceticism and did not intend to found anything. What he did was go further out than anyone had gone, stay for decades, and become famous for it, and the Life written by Athanasius shortly after his death in 356 became one of the most widely read books of late antiquity — Augustine names it as part of what pushed him to convert. The desert filled up behind him: hermits under Antony's pattern, and from around 320 the communal houses organised by Pachomius, which are the direct ancestor of every monastery with a rule and a timetable. The sayings of these men and women, the Apophthegmata, are terse, funny and unsentimental, and the ammas among them — Syncletica, Sarah, Theodora — are quoted alongside the abbas. The Coptic monasteries in the Wadi el-Natrun and at the Red Sea are still there and still full, and the Coptic Church still draws every one of its bishops and its pope from the monasteries.