14 DAY TRIAL // Not too long ago, a sphinx measuring as much as 15 feet (4.6 meters) in height was pulled from sand dunes in the small city of Guadalupe in California, US.
When found, the sphinx was pretty much destroyed. In fact, as noticeable in the photo accompanying this article, it didn't even look very much like a sphinx. On the contrary, it very much resembled a pile of seriously oversized smashed eggshells.
The good news is that specialists are now working on reconstructing it. Should things go as planned, the sphinx will be put back together in a few months and will go on display sometime towards the beginning of 2015.
Not your usual sphinx
Mind you, this sphinx wasn't built by ancient Egyptians or anything of the sorts. It was put together from plaster back in the 1920s, and it was one of the 21 sphinxes featured in “The Ten Commandments,” a 1923 movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
Since folks who made movies in those days didn't have any special effects technologies to pick and choose from, they had to find people skillful enough to actually make whatever statues and buildings they wanted to include in their work.
According to Live Science, the parts of the sphinx that was pulled from sand dunes in Guadalupe, California, not too long ago were made in Los Angeles and only later transported to the movie set. Here, they were assembled in the form of the hollow statue.
Excavating a decades-old movie set
It is understood that, after director Cecil B. DeMille was done working on “The Ten Commandments,” the movie set was simply abandoned. In time, local winds and rain took care of burying the sphinxes, together with other props, in the sand.
Researchers and movie enthusiasts first started excavating the site back in 1990. Apart from remains of the props used to shoot “The Ten Commandments,” they have until now found several personal belongings left behind by the people who worked on this project.
Thus, they have so far unearthed tobacco tins and even bottles that specialists believe were used to hold some kind of substitute for alcohol during the Prohibition Era, which started in 1920 and ended in over a decade later, in 1933.
“What objects like that tell us is that there wasn't a whole lot to do at the making of this movie,” archaeologist M. Colleen Hamilton commented on these findings in a recent interview. “These guys had a lot of really good times before takes,” he added.