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.