Georges Coedès

Who was Georges Coedès?

George Cœdès, pronounced sedɛs, was a 20th-century scholar of southeast Asian archaeology and history. Cœdès was born in Paris to a family of supposed Hungarian-Jewish emigres. In fact, the family was known as having settled in the region of Strasbourg before 1740. His ancestors worked for the royal Treasury. His grandfather, Louis Eugène Cœdès was a painter, pupil of Léon Coignet. His father Hyppolite worked as a banker. Cœdès became director of the National Library of Thailand in 1918, and in 1929 became director of L'École française d'Extrême-Orient, where he remained until 1946. Thereafter he lived in Paris until he died in 1969. In 1935 he married Neang Yao. He wrote two seminal texts in the field, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia and The Making of South East Asia, as well as innumerable articles, in which he developed the concept of the Indianized kingdom. However, the modern consensus is that the Indianization was less complete than Cœdès had believed, with many indigenous practices surviving underneath the Indian surface. Perhaps his greatest lasting scholarly accomplishment was his work on Sanskrit and Old Khmer inscriptions from Cambodia.