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Instead what makes Roman Egypt’s uniqueness so important is one of the unique things about it: Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world.
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By far the most important of those things is paper, particularly papyrus paper. The Romans actually had a number of writing solutions. For short-term documents, they used wax writing tablets, an ancient sort of ‘dry erase board’ which could be scraped smooth to write a new text when needed; these only survive under very unusual circumstances. For more permanent documents, wood and papyrus were used. Wood tablets, such as those famously recovered from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, are fairly simple: thin wooden slats are smoothed so they can be written on with link and a pen, creating a rigid but workable and cheap writing surface; when we find these tablets they have tended to be short documents like letters or temporary lists, presumably in part because storing lots of wood tablets would be hard so more serious records would go on the easier to store papyrus paper.
Papyrus paper was lighter, more portable, more storeable option.
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In Egypt, by contrast, while the Romans disassembled the royal Ptolemaic court, they initially seem to have left much of its administrative apparatus of salaries administrators in place.
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Meanwhile the Romans did another odd thing in that they didn’t change: the currency system.
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But Egypt was not brought into the Roman currency system, instead maintaining the Ptolemaic currency system based on the silver tetradrachma (Egypt was already a very monetized economy under the Ptolemies).
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First, it is clear that Egyptian agricultural yields (understood as either production-per-unit-land-area or production-per-unit-seed-sown) were generally higher than what we think to have been the norm for much of the Roman world.
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First, it is clear that Egyptian agricultural yields (understood as either production-per-unit-land-area or production-per-unit-seed-sown) were generally higher than what we think to have been the norm for much of the Roman world.
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Or as I put it to my students, it is the case that the Pyramids (constructed c. 2670-2400) were about as old to Cleopatra and Caesar as Cleopatra and Caesar are to us now (in fact, if you do the math, the Pyramids were a little older).
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Older scholarship often posited a sort of culturally ‘eternal Egypt’ which resisted the pressures of ‘Romanization’ (itself now a contested term rarely used by scholars); that vision of a total lack of cultural exchange just doesn’t hold up to the evidence.
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Importantly, that means that Roman Egypt seems to have become a less unusual part of the Roman world as time went on.
