Prasat Thom Pyramid, Koh Ker

The Prang's silhouette does the heavy lifting in alternative accounts. Diffusionist writers such as David Hatcher Childress note that a steep, seven-tiered, largely unadorned stepped pyramid with a single frontal stair resembles Tikal or Uxmal far more than anything else in Southeast Asia, and fold Koh Ker into a case for contact or common inheritance among pyramid-building cultures worldwide. Some point to knob-like protrusions left on certain stone blocks — comparable, they argue, to the bosses seen on megalithic masonry in Peru, Egypt and Turkey — as the signature of a shared, possibly ancient, construction technology.

The YouTube researcher Praveen Mohan has popularised further mysteries: a local legend that the pyramid was built in a single night (or twelve hours) by supernatural means; the deep central shaft descending from the summit sanctuary, which he suggests may conceal chambers or serve an energetic function connected with the vanished four-metre lingam; and the sheer speed of Jayavarman IV's building programme, which he and others argue strains credulity for a 10th-century workforce. Behind the pyramid lies the so-called Tomb of the White Elephant, an unexcavated circular mound that alternative writers suspect is a second, buried pyramid or a royal tomb.

Mainstream archaeologists reply that every feature has a Khmer pedigree: stepped temple-mountains evolved locally over the preceding century; lifting bosses are a mundane and worldwide quarrying technique; the central shaft is a known feature of temple-mountains (a comparable one exists at Baksei Chamkrong) associated with foundation deposits; and inscriptions, ceramics and LiDAR-mapped infrastructure all lock the city into the 920s–940s. The mound behind the Prang remains genuinely uninvestigated, however, and archaeologists agree its purpose is unresolved.