After almost 91 years of being buried in the sand dunes in Guadalupe, California, the giant sphinx used in the 1923 "The Ten Commandments" film has been rediscovered. The massive statue will be available for public viewing by early next year.
Doug Jenzen, executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, and his team will start restoring the enormous statue as some its parts were damaged because of the long time that it was beneath the rolling sand dunes.
"The Ten Commandments" is a 1923 film produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille featuring the biblical story of Exodus. The Exodus scenes were filmed at the sand dunes of Guadalupe, which is now an archaeological site. The producers chose it because of its likeness to the Egyptian desert. Back then, special effects were non-existent, so people had to build huge sets, including four 11-meter-tall Pharaoh statues, 21 sphinxes, and 110-foot-high gates. The site was dynamited after filming and since then, these massive objects remained buried beneath the sands.
Filmmaker Peter Brosnan believes that DeMille might have chosen to bury the artifacts in order to reduce operations cost as they would need to compensate workers to remove everything, but he didn't want others to use it either, according to USA Today.
Archaeologists started excavating in the 1990s to salvage some objects used in one of the largest movie sets ever made. They watched the movie many times in order to locate the sphinxes. In 2012, Applied EarthWorks archaeologist Kholood Abdo Hintzman and his colleagues found the head of the sphinx and continued digging until they unearthed the entire body. It turned out that the rolling sand dunes weren't powerful enough to move the massive statue away from its original location.
The sphinx will undergo restoration, as weather had dulled its red and ochre colors. Once it is ready, the sphinx will be exhibited at the Dunes Center in 2015.
"I think it's a great piece of Americana," Jenzen told Live Science. "But you have to hunker down to watch the whole thing, because it's more than three hours long and it's silent."
