The Buried Ten Commandments Set

Somewhere beneath the Guadalupe Nipomo dunes, a few miles south of Pismo Beach, lies a buried Egyptian city that was never real. In nineteen twenty-three the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille came to this coast to shoot his silent epic, The Ten Commandments, and he brought Hollywood on a colossal scale.

Crews raised a plaster and wood set said to stand as tall as a ten story building, lined with sphinxes and towering statues, and around it spread a tent city housing thousands of workers and extras. When filming wrapped, moving the enormous set was more trouble than it was worth. Legend says DeMille deliberately buried it so no rival could reuse his city, but most historians think it was simply knocked down and abandoned, then swallowed by the drifting sand.

For decades it was the stuff of rumor, until in nineteen eighty-three a group of film buffs, following a cryptic clue in DeMille's own posthumous autobiography, found the site. Later excavations pulled real artifacts from the dunes, plaster sphinx fragments, a plaster sphinx recovered in twenty fourteen, along with coins, tobacco tins, and cough syrup bottles left by the crew. Many of these finds are now displayed at the Guadalupe Nipomo Dunes Center in an exhibit fittingly called the Lost City of DeMille.