Ancient Egyptian Ruins in Southern California!

[Yazata]

Here's how it looked in the day. (No, not 2,000 BC, in 1923!)

[Image: city-of-the-pharaoh-ten-commandments_h.j...k=xqmDkWlF]

It was a movie set for Cecil B. DeMille's silent film The Ten Commandments. This was the most expensive movie ever made, at the time. A whole ancient city! Spectacle! Thousands of extras! This is the guy who made Hollywood into Hollywood !

It was filmed in the coastal sand dunes near San Luis Obispo because they had that endless desert sand dunes effect the director wanted.

Here are the Hebrews wandering through the desert following Moses:

[Image: 34-ten-commandments-1-get.jpg]

When DeMille was done filming his film, he ordered the entire set buried in the sand. Lost to history, it remained kind of legendary through the years. Everyone had heard of it but nobody knew precisely where it was. But it's been declared a state historical site and a lot of it has been excavated more recently, including a whole line of sphinxes, and the relics are now in a local museum.

I've dropped acid in those dunes! (Never imagined that I saw any ancient Egyptian cities though. Or got any messages from burning bushes.)

[C C]

This was the most expensive movie ever made, at the time. A whole ancient city! [...] When DeMille was done filming his film, he ordered the entire set buried in the sand.

Thank goodness The Difference Engine was fiction. That faux civilization would have never been available to exhume if CGI had been available back in the 1920s.

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