At the heart of the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist stands the great prayer of thanksgiving, known in Eastern Christian traditions as anaphora (offering), in which the offerings of bread and wine are consecrated as the body and blood of Christ. Because of the oral character of early liturgical prayer, our knowledge of the formation of Eucharistic prayers in the first three centuries is very limited. This chapter will first examine several ‘paleoanaphoras’ that are generally held to have originated from the pre-Constantinian period, although questions of dating and possible earlier forms of these Eucharistic prayers continue to be debated in contemporary scholarship. The following section will briefly survey some of the ‘classical’ anaphoras of this period, which can be broadly divided into Antiochene and Alexandrian types. A consideration of scriptural readings and liturgical music will complete this chapter.