Max Mallowan

Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan (6 May 1904 – 19 August 1978) was a British archaeologist 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. He then directed a number of archaeological expeditions sponsored by the British Museum and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. He was the second husband of Agatha Christie, having met her during the excavation at Ur in 1930. He served in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War, and then entered academia. He was Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the University of London (1947–1962) and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (1962–1971).

Early life and education Born Edgar Mallowan on 6 May 1904 in Wandsworth, London, England, to Frederick Mallowan, a businessman who had served with the Austrian horse artillery, and his wife Marguerite (née Duvivier), whose mother was mezzo-soprano singer Marthe Duvivier. He was educated at Rokeby School, a boys’ preparatory school, and Lancing College, then an all-boys independent boarding school (where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Humphrey Trevelyan). He achieved a Fourth-class honours in Mods in 1923 and third-class honours in Greats in 1925. Among others, he was taught by H. A. L. Fisher, Percy Gardner and Gilbert Murray. 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.

War service 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. He was commissioned as a pilot officer on probation in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch on 11 February 1941, promoted flying officer on 18 August 1941, flight lieutenant on 1 April 1943 and for some time he also had the rank of wing commander. His first role with the RAF was as a liaison officer with allied forces and, later in the war, as a civilian affairs officer in North Africa.

Academic career After the war, in 1947, he was appointed Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the University of London. In 1954, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. This was a senior research fellowship that omitted the requirement to teach and so he could concentrate on writing up the excavations at Nimrud.

Personal life

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 and was interred alongside his first wife, Agatha Christie, in the churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey in Oxfordshire. His estate was valued at £524,054. His second wife, Barbara, died in Wallingford in 1993, at the age of 85.

Honours Mallowan was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1960 Queen's Birthday Honours, and knighted in 1968. He gave the 1969 Albert Reckitt Archaeological Lecture.

In popular culture In 2019, Mallowan was played by Jonah Hauer-King for the movie Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar.

In 2022, Mallowan was played by Lucian Msamati in the British-American movie See How They Run.

Selected works