Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, CBE, FBA, FSA (6 May 1904 – 19 August 1978) was a prominent British archaeologist and academic, specializing in the Ancient Near East.

Having studied classics at Oxford University, he was trained for archaeology by Leonard Woolley at Ur and Reginald Campbell Thompson at Nineveh.

[7] In 1932, he spent a brief time working at Nineveh with Reginald Campbell Thompson, where he made a 21 metre-deep shaft down to natural level in the Kuyunjiq tell.

His excavations included the prehistoric village at Tell Arpachiyah, and the sites at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak[6] in the Upper Khabur area (Syria).

[8] After the beginning of the Second World War he served with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in North Africa, being based for part of 1943 at the ancient city of Sabratha in Libya.

[5] Agatha Christie died in 1976; the next year, Mallowan married Barbara Hastings Parker, an archaeologist, who had been his epigraphist at Nimrud and Secretary of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

He died on 19 August 1978, aged 74, at Greenway House in Devon[15] and was interred alongside his first wife in the churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey[16] in Oxfordshire.

[18] Mallowan was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1960 Queen's Birthday Honours,[19] and knighted in 1968.