What distinguishes the Agpeya among the world's books of hours is who prays it. The Latin breviary became a clerical obligation, and the Byzantine Horologion largely a monastic one; the Agpeya stayed in the hands of the whole church. Coptic children memorise its opening prayers and psalms; the devout carry pocket editions and pray the hours they can, the First and Twelfth at minimum, in a rhythm every catechism teaches; the fasts that fill the Coptic calendar bring the fuller cycle into ordinary homes; and the priest prays the hours as preparation for the liturgy, the Agpeya's psalmody serving as the church's vestibule. The book's modern life is vigorous rather than residual.
The Coptic revival of the twentieth century, with its renewed monasteries and its Sunday School movement, put the Agpeya at the centre of lay spirituality, and the diaspora has translated it into English, French, German and the other languages of Coptic emigration, with phone applications now carrying the hours alongside the printed book. Its theology of time is the common Christian one, each hour remembering a moment of the economy of salvation, but its temper is distinctively Egyptian: heavy with psalms, sparing of hymnody, insistent on repetition, the desert's conviction that the psalter prayed continually is itself transformation. Set beside the Zoroastrian gahs, the Muslim salat and the Jewish services in this atlas's cycle of daily prayer, the Agpeya is Christianity's fullest surviving example of an entire community, not a professional class, keeping the hours.