The Agpeya — seven hours, one psalter.
The book of hours divides the day into seven prayers, each with its own set of psalms, a gospel, and the absolution. Laypeople keep it as well as monks, and the shortest hour takes about ten minutes. It is the reason a Coptic funeral or a night vigil can go on for hours without anyone needing a printed programme.
Agpeya comes from the Coptic for hour. The seven hours are prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline and midnight, and monastics add the Prayer of the Veil. Each hour has twelve psalms, a gospel passage, litanies and the Lord's Prayer, and each ends with the same absolution. Because the psalms are fixed rather than cycling, a Copt who prays the Agpeya for a year has said some psalms hundreds of times — which is how the text ends up memorised rather than read.
The same ground, other faiths
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