"Old Style" Empires

The question what I mean by "old style" came up, it's a good one and I can see how the language could be read in a number of ways. Let's take the term to mean the complex of institutions and practices that characterized universal cosmopolitan agrarian empires beginning with the Akkadian Empire and continuing through the East Roman and Sasanian empires. What makes an empire fully imperial? Not an easy question, but the enduring ones would have shared the following: a political institution that ruled a wide variety of peoples; that claimed (though rarely achieved) universal dominion; that was ruled from a cosmopolitan center-of-the-world capital, with a ruling dynasty at the top. The latter employed some kind of political theater that advanced the argument that ruler was a being unlike any other, sometimes divine, sometimes a unique representative of the divine. All pre-modern empires also sought to make their subjects believe that the empire was natural, inevitable, desirable, and divinely sanctioned. By doing so they hoped to reduce the need for violent coercion to the minimal level necessary.