GUADALUPE, CALIFORNIA—The body of a giant sphinx from the set of the 1923 silent movie “The Ten Commandments” has been carefully removed from the sand in Guadalupe, California. The 15-foot-tall plaster sphinx is one of 21 that lined the path featured in the three-hour film, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. “[The 1923 film] was one of the largest movie sets ever made, because they didn’t have special effects. So anything that they wanted to look large, they had to build large,” Doug Jenzen, executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, explained to Live Science. The hollow sphinxes eventually collapsed under the wind and rain and were covered by the shifting sand dunes. “The site is basically being destroyed through erosion. It’s become more critical to try to salvage some materials before they disappear,” said historical archaeologist M. Colleen Hamilton of Applied EarthWorks.
