I asked this 4 days ago and got no answer, so here goes: Can we speak of an Eastern Mediterranean imperial tradition akin to the Chinese tradition of empire? How recognizable would Ottoman institutions in 1683 have been to a Byzantine observer in 1018, or a Roman observer in 392?

See what's interesting about this question, is that yes you can speak of an eastern mediterranean imperial tradition... from the perspective of "westerners" viewing an oriental despotic monarchic tradition, that the "westerns" are operating in opposition to.

Now the continuities and cultural exchanges of near eastern states are well known, even stretching into late antiquity (Canepa's Two Eyes of the Earth is a good book for demonstrating this), but the essential problem and difference between the continuities as well as differences of the eastern mediterranean with the known continuities and differences of the chinese realms, is simply that the Chinese realm claimed a continuity, whereas the eastern mediterranean empires did not (whenever a new state subsumed the old).

I think this is because the Chinese had a particularly notion of delimited "maximum territory" of the civilized world / "China" that inheritors of the chinese tradition would use to great effect, and would be able to consistently reconstitute. Meaning being "Chinese" was useful for new polities, despite discontinuities, because they could use this identity/ideology, successfully, to conquer a large swath of area considered "Chinese" in the past.

This, I think, is a similar reason for the longevity of the mediterranean Roman Empire. They had a conception of their territory that was useful to those within that political structure to fight for the entire mediterranean pie, rather than to regionalize it.

However once the Arab conquests started, and both successfully conquered a significant portion of the empire, but at the same time being unsuccessful at conquering the mediterrenean, cemented themselves around new identities to reflect the limits of their territorial conquest, which is why we have the modern split of the mediterranean as frontier rather than integrated center.

But if you're talking about near eastern empires within themselves, then no. And I suspect this is because the territory is not well defined as a region which can be politically useful for aggressive expansion (although the Sasanids definitely claimed Achaemenid precedence for their expansion into Roman territory), it was far more useful for each new dynasty/polity to reject older traditions than it was to continue them.