Coptic Rite

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.

The Coptic church serves its eucharist with three anaphoras, and the choice among them tells the history of Egyptian Christianity in miniature. The ordinary prayer is the Coptic anaphora of St Basil, a shorter and probably older form of the same prayer the Byzantine church reserves for its solemn days, so that the everyday liturgy of Egypt preserves what many scholars regard as an earlier stage of one of Christendom's central texts.

For the great feasts the church turns to the anaphora of St Gregory, a prayer remarkable for being addressed throughout to Christ rather than to the Father, its long meditation on the incarnation suiting the festal seasons. The third, the anaphora of St Cyril, is the Coptic redaction of the ancient Liturgy of St Mark, the native eucharistic tradition of Alexandria, whose Greek form is attested in early papyrus fragments; it is now used rarely, chiefly in Lent, but its survival inside the living rite keeps unbroken the line back to the church's own apostolic foundation legend, the preaching of Mark in Alexandria. Around these prayers the rite deploys a full system of daily offices, the Agpeya hours kept by clergy and laity alike, and seven sacraments served with an elaborate ceremonial that the diaspora has carried worldwide, translating the books into Arabic and English while the Bohairic chant continues above the translations.