ABSTRACT
The major early church centres that authors encounter in the Church Orders and patristic sources are places like Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. Interest in Jerusalem's liturgy has meant that one of the most important sources for it, a Lectionary, is in Armenian. Upon the destruction of the old Armenian kingdom, a new state was established in Cilicia, and the church there entered into communion with the Roman Catholic crusaders in the twelfth century. When this union ended because of renewed Arab onslaughts, some relics of Western practice remained in the Armenian liturgy. The Coptic church of Alexandria, the indigenous church of Egypt, has a long history, the beginnings of which are very obscure. The foundation of the Egyptian church is traditionally ascribed to St Mark. In the early fourth century, or thereabouts, two shipwrecked Egyptian boys became attached to the court of the Ethiopian king. Christians existed in the Persian Empire from about the mid second century.
