When shooting wrapped on Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 film "The Ten Commandments," the legendary director had the massive set bulldozed and buried into the sand dunes of Guadalupe , California. More than 90 years, archaeologists have uncovered one of the original sphinxes used in the film.
The Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center oversaw the excavation of the roughly 15-foot-tall sphinx buried in Guadalupe, located about 165 miles from Los Angeles, for 91 years, according to Live Science. The film crew built each of the 21 sphinxes in L.A., transported them up the coast, and reassembled them into giant, hollow statues.
"[The 1923 film] was one of the largest movie sets ever made, because they didn't have special effects," Doug Jenzen, executive director for the Dunes Center, told Live Science. "So anything that they wanted to look large, they had to build large."
The set for Pharoah's City stood an estimated 12 stories tall and about 720 feet across. The Paramount Pictures production had a budget of an estimated $1.8 million, according to IMDb.com.
The Dunes Center will restore the sphinx, beaten over the decades by wind, rain and sand. It will then put the sphinx on public display by mid to late 2015. The archaeologists started uncovering the sphinx in 2012.
"We'd work during the day, and we'd watch the movie at night to figure out what we were finding," M. Colleen Hamilton of Applied EarthWorks in California, told Live Science. Hamilton is a historical archaeology program manager and senior historical archaeologist.
Excavation of the Guadalupe dunes began in the 1990s. Archaeologists found small movie artifacts including tobacco tins and cough syrup bottles, a likely substitute for alcohol during the Prohibition Era (1920-1933), according to Jenzen.
"What objects like that tell us is that there wasn't a whole lot to do at the making of this movie," Jenzen said. "These guys had a lot of really good times before takes."
The Dunes Center had uncovered another sphinx two years ago, but wind and erosion had left it a "greying, crumbling mess," according to Live Science. The wind did help the team find the body of another sphinx and they slowly excavated it from Oct. 6 to Oct. 14, 2014.
