Posted on 12/02/2017 2:10:44 PM PST by nickcarraway
Archaeologists working in sand dunes on the central California coast have dug up an intact plaster sphinx that was part of an Egyptian movie set built more than 90 years ago for Cecil B. DeMille's epic "The Ten Commandments."
The 300-pound sphinx is the second recovered from the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
In other news, being buried under sand is an effective strategy to avoiding sexual predators.
Boy, archaelogists are really going to be puzzled in 4000 years when they find more of this stuff.
Ping
The desert sets (Tunisia?) were scavenged clean by movie fans and memorabilia sellers.
In myth the Sphinx was a feared and horrible creature.
If you didn't answer its riddle correctly it strangled you.
“I’m ready for my closeup Mr. DeMille”
90 years? The Ten Commandments was released in 1956.
This isn’t new. People have written and known about that movie set in the desert for decades.
The 1923 version.
The Ten Commandments was released in 1956
He was a Producer on the 1923 version.
L
I had to turn it sideways, but I’m pretty sure it’s Angelina Jolie.
Is she missing?
Thew 1923 silent version.
DeMille made an earlier version in 1923.
WIKI—The Exodus scenes were filmed at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes in northern Santa Barbara County.The film location was originally chosen because its immense sand dunes provided a superficial resemblance to the Egyptian desert.
Rumor had it that after the filming was complete, the massive sets which included four 35-foot-tall (11 m) Pharaoh statues, 21 sphinxes, and gates reaching a height of 110 feet, which were built by a small army of 1,600 workers were dynamited and buried in the sand.
Instead, the wind, rain and sand at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes likely collapsed and buried a large part of the set under the ever-shifting dunes.
The statues and sphinxes are in roughly the same place they were during filming. In 2012, archaeologists uncovered the head of one of the prop sphinxes; a 2014 recovery effort showed the body of that sphinx to have deteriorated significantly, but a second better-preserved sphinx was discovered and excavated.
Why even bother with it? I used to live next to a gravel pit that was once a cow pasture, which was an old landfill before that. We found all kinds of stuff in there that had to be old but nothing you wouldn’t throw into the lake that was created by the digging of the gravel pit. The bass we caught in that lake were better finds than anything else.
The Sphinx has knockers?
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