egyptian-archaeology"
original_url: “https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2009/06/oceano-dunes-2---egyptian-archaeology.html”
canonical_url: “https://throughthesandglass.com/blog/oceano-dunes-2---egyptian-archaeology”
scraped_at: “2025-11-22T23:17:21.570733”
keywords: [“http”, “dune”, “sand”, “demille”, “set”, “california”, “movie”, “film”, “pharaoh”, “site”]
description: “The dunes at Oceano that I visited and introduced in the previous post are but the northern tip of the eighteen-mile-long Oceano-Nipomo-Guadalupe dunes complex, the largest landscape of coastal dunes in California. Further south, the dunes are punctuated by lakes,…”
word_count: 796
content_type: “text/html; charset=utf-8”
status_code: 200
content_length: 65977
slug: “oceano-dunes-2—egyptian-archaeology”

Oceano dunes (2) - Egyptian archaeology

The dunes at Oceano that I visited and introduced in the previous post
are but the northern tip of the eighteen-mile-long Oceano-Nipomo-Guadalupe dunes
complex, the largest landscape of coastal dunes in California. Further south,
the dunes are punctuated by lakes, marshes and the river channels that supply
the sand to the coast for later redistribution by the wind. We know that coastal
dunes differ from their desert relatives, but for movie-makers whose budget does
not allow for a trip to the Sahara, California’s dunes provide a passable
desert-replicating backdrop. They have played this role recently for the third
in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, but have hosted many other
dramas, including *Hidalgo, G.I.Jane,*and The Last Outpost with
Cary Grant. However, their Hollywood heyday was much earlier - Rudolph Valentino
stalked the dunes in the 1920s Sheikmovies and Marlene Dietrich was
transported across the sand in her car mounted on a sled since she refused to
walk in the stuff during filming of Morocco with Gary Cooper in 1930.
But the most famous and enduring role that   the Nipomo dunes have played was in
Cecil B. DeMille’s first version of The Ten Commandments, arguably the
first epic film, made in the silent era in 1923. For his 1956 remake with
Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, and Anne Baxter, DeMille went to Egypt, but for
his original version the budget didn’t extend that far so he went to Nipomo. And
there he built a truly epic set for the City of the Pharaohs and the Exodus
scenes, and the remains of that set lie beneath the sands today.

The movie had, for the times, an astonishing budget of $1.4 million which
DeMille set about spending with abandon - it’s reported that, in response to
telegrams expressing concern over his extravagance, he asked . “What do they
want me to do? Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments?” He employed as
his set designer Paul Iribe, a Frenchman who would later return to his native
country and become one of the founders of the Art Deco movement. Tribe was
certainly the man for DeMille’s epic vision. The temple wall, 700 feet
wide, towered over a hundred feet above the dunes, decorated with hieroglyphics
modelled on those recently discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun; four 20 ton
statues of the Pharaoh and 21 sphinxes were shipped in by train. On site for
the month of shooting were 3,500 actors, 1,500 construction workers and 5,000
animals; a huge camp had to be built to provide living quarters. The weather was
distinctly cold and actors had to have their skin coated in glycerine so as to
appear to be perspiring in the Egyptian sun.

At the end of shooting, DeMille
destroyed (bulldozed, some say dynamited) the set in order to prevent cheap and
nimble competitors using it and possibly because he could not afford the removal
required in his contract with the landowner. The remains were rapidly buried in
the sand, but locals have long described a single dune that didn’t move -
supposedly because it was anchored by DeMille’s debris.

But then the El Nino winter storms of the 1980s arrived and stripped the sand
away, revealing scattered fragments of the Pharaoh’s City. It was then that a
documentary film maker, Peter Brosnan, spurred on by a comment in DeMille’s
autobiography that future archaeologists might be seriously misled about an
ancient Egyptian outpost on the California coast, teamed up with archaeologist
John Parker, and began serious investigation. Amongst the scattered wood debris, they
found fragments of the plaster statuary (including a Pharaoh’s foot), now
degraded and fragile, together with tobacco tins and other artifacts from the
1920s. Ground penetrating radar helped them identify other large objects buried
in the sand and define the area of the remains. A Pharaonic hand is on display
at the Dunes Center in Guadalupe. Funds are still sought for a proper excavation
of what is, arguably, a key cultural and cinematographic historic site, the
largest movie set ever built at the time, partly exposed to the elements but
largely still hidden beneath the California sands.

[see Brosnan’s site,  http://www.lostcitydemille.com/index.html,
from which some of the illustrations above come, The Center for Land Use
Interpretation description of the archaeological site, http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA4973/,
a good description on Siffblog*,*and
an NPR interview with Brosnan from a few years ago at  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4494713. For other movies starring sand, see my April4 post, Granular films, and thanks to Kevin, our Oceano guide, for bringing this story to my attention] SIGNATURE

Comments

Marilyn Nelson (2009-12-17):

The gentleman who was hired by DeMille to design the sets is named Paul Iribe, not Tribe.

Sandglass (2009-12-17):

Apologies - typographical error now corrected - thanks for pointing this out!

ENT Instruments (2012-01-24):

I’am the regular visitor of your web. its very informative site.