The Egyptian City Under the Dunes

Somewhere in the dunes ahead of you, under several feet of shifting sand, there is an Egyptian city. Not an ancient one. A Hollywood one. But it has been down there for more than a century, and in some respects the distinction has stopped mattering.

In May of nineteen twenty-three, approximately fifteen hundred workers spent six weeks building a full-scale Egyptian film set in the Oceano Dunes for director Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic, The Ten Commandments. The art director was Paul Iribe, later regarded as a forerunner of the Art Deco movement, though he himself publicly criticized it. What they built was extraordinary in scale: four Pharaoh statues each thirty-five feet tall, an avenue lined with twenty-one sphinx figures each weighing five tons, a gate approximately one hundred ten feet tall, a temple facade one hundred twenty feet tall and eight hundred feet long. The whole set weighed roughly one million pounds. The production employed hundreds of local people in supporting roles and housed cast and crew in a tent city on the dunes.

When filming ended, DeMille reportedly ordered the entire set buried in the sand rather than bear the cost of dismantling it and hauling it away. The dunes shifted over the material for decades.

In nineteen eighty-three, a filmmaker named Peter Brosnan located the site through archival research and aerial photography. Excavations beginning in the nineteen nineties and continuing through the present have been recovering fragments of plaster, painted reliefs, and even horse bones from the chariot sequences. The project has become one of the most distinctive archaeological undertakings in California, a Hollywood artifact being excavated with the same methodology applied to ancient ruins.

The buried city lies within what is now the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, a federally protected wildlife refuge. You cannot dig for it yourself. But it is there.