Mallowan gave an account of his work in "Twenty-five Years of Mesopotamian Discovery" (1956) and his wife Agatha Christie described his work in Syria in "Come, Tell Me How You Live" (1946). Max's first wife, Lady Mallowan, known to millions as Dame Agatha Christie, died in 1976; the following 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. Mallowan was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1960 Queen's Birthday Honours, and knighted in 1968. He and Dame Agatha Christie were among a number of married couples each of whom held knightly honours in their own right. He died on 19 August 1978, aged 74, in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, and was interred alongside his first wife, Dame Agatha, in the churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey. His widow Barbara, the second Lady Mallowan, died in Wallingford in 1993, at the age of 85.