When the Uruk expansion collapsed the impulse for city-building ended with it. Small towns and villages remained but there is little evidence of wide-scale urbanisation in Syria until the twenty-sixth century BC when a number of cities reached a size of 100 hectares (≈247 acres). An important development during the Bronze Age was the wide use of mud-brick walls for the defence of the cities. The major fortified cities in Syria included Ebla (=Tell Mardikh), Mari (=Tell Hariri), Qatna (=Tell Mishrife), Hama (=ancient Hamath), Aleppo (=Halab), Ugarit (=Ras Shamra) and Damascus. Each seems to have been the centre of a city-state.
The two major states were Elba (southwest of Aleppo) and Mari (north of Abu Kamal). Ebla functioned as an entrepot of the trade eastward to Mesopotamia, southward to Byblos, and hence indirectly with Egypt; and Mari grew rich through its control of the trade with Mesopotamia that lacked basic resources such as timber, metals and stone. Mari was dominant at first, gradually advancing up the Euphrates to the land controlled by Ebla. Ebla dispatched an army under Enna-Dagan (23rd century BC), who launched a counterattack and retook the cities that had been captured by Mari.
To gain access to northwest Syria and the Mediterranean the Akkadians had to overcome both Mari and Ebla. Sargon (r.c.2270-c.2215 BC) claimed to have conquered Mari and Ebla, and then westward to the Mediterranean. After the fall of the Akkadian Empire (c.2270-c.2083 BC), the kings of Ur III imposed their suzerainty over Mari, Elba and possibly Byblos on the coast, until the arrival of the Amorites.
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