Georges Cœdès was in his early 20s when he visited the Near East Collection at the Louvre, the famous museum in Paris near where he lived. He was intrigued an ancient Babylonian inscription in a display. This early experience led him to study ancient languages and to spend his life uncovering ancient mysteries contained in inscriptions from Southeast Asia.
Cœdès had an intriguing theory. He believed that numerals had originated in civilizations throughout Asia that shared a common culture based in the religions of Buddhism or Hinduism. Other scholars at the time assumed that numbers had to have come from Greece or Arabia, but Cœdès felt that this belief failed to value the intellectual developments of the East. At this point, Cœdès had no proof for his theory. Then, in the course of his work, he came across an untranslated inscription found on a stone that he called K-127, from an ancient temple at Sambor on Mekong in Cambodia. Translating the writing, he was stunned to discover that it contained the elusive zero that he had hoped to find!

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