George Coedès

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George Cœdès (1886-1969) was a 20th century scholar of southeast Asian archaeology and history. He 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. He wrote two seminal texts in the field, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968, 1975) and The Making of South East Asia (1966), 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 Coedès had believed, with many indigenous practices surviving underneath the Indian surface.

George Coedès is credited with rediscovering the former kingdom of Srivijaya, centred around the modern-day Indonesian city of Palembang, but with influence extending from Sumatra through to the Malay Peninsula and Java. No modern Indonesians, including those of the Palembang area, had heard of Srivijaya until the 1920s, when Coedès published his discoveries and interpretations in Dutch and Indonesian-language newspapers.^[1]