It's now housed at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Southern California, and goes on display for the public tomorrow evening (June 12). Tickets to the Roaring ’20s Gala Unveiling at $25 per person can be purchased at www.dunescenter.org. The center at 1065 Guadalupe St. in Guadalupe is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. 
 
 The Ten Commandments exhibit featuring a sphinx body and other artifacts will be on display at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center starting Saturday, June 13. The Roaring ’20s are coming back to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center tonight, June 12, for a gala to unveil the body of a sphinx excavated from the long-buried set of Cecil B. DeMille’s epic silent film “The Ten Commandments.” 
 
 Just 50 tickets were available at press time for the 1920s-themed event from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., when an all-new exhibit of artifacts, photographs and information about the movie will be opened at the center. And now it lives in the unassuming Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Guadalupe. The sphinx was recently removed from the dunes as part of a $120,000 excavation project and will be unveiled Friday in a new exhibit featuring the 10½-foot sphinx body, customized artwork, a separate sphinx head from a 2012 excavation and artifacts such as tobacco tins, bottles and photos from DeMille’s film set. The silent movie had an enormous set to show the grandeur of Pharaoh's City, which was lined with 21 regal sphinxes, each standing 35 feet (11 meters) tall when they were on their pedestals. Though the camp was marketed as “wholesome” in contemporary newspaper articles, artifacts from the recent excavation show that workers still managed to sneak in contraband, Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzen said. Artifacts left by the crew suggest they had a good time on the set while making the movie. After filming concluded, DeMille left the gigantic set out in the dunes for unknown reasons, even though he was under contract with Santa Barbara County to return the dunes to the state they had been in before filming, Jenzen said. Others say he simply didn’t want it being used again in other films (a common practice in the movie industry at the time). After seeing the exhibit, enthusiasts may also want to see "The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille," a new movie about the making of the movie by Peter Brosnan, Jenzen said. When they returned in October 2014, however, Jenzen and his team found that the winds had moved the sand and exposed the plaster statue to the elements, spreading pieces everywhere and making it difficult to handle them. "So you need to have a team of people there who are able to pull the sand away and excavate it all simultaneously." It’s just a roller coaster of emotion.” 
 
 Luck was on their side, however, when Jenzen and Burbank-based art restorer Amy Higgins noticed what looked like a “giant white buffalo wing” in the sand, he said. "It corresponds to all of the photos we have of people in the 1930s going out to the dunes and posing with these Egyptian statues that are sticking out of the sand." To do that, the Dunes Center is looking for about $85,000 to fund the next phase of excavation.
– After months of painstaking work in the sands of California, archaeologists have managed to restore a sphinx and other relics from a lost age—1920s Hollywood. The sphinx, one of 21 used in Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 movie The Ten Commandments, has been restored after it was excavated from California's Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. DeMille left an enormous set buried there, but what the San Luis Obispo Tribune calls the "Lost City of DeMille" started to be uncovered as sands shifted in the 1990s. The relic goes on display at a nearby cultural center today, and LiveScience notes that in humid conditions, working with the plaster sphinx archaeologists call Nora wasn't easy and she's not quite as good as new: There's a bullet hole in her stomach, as well as graffiti reading "May 1930," and her head—along with the rest of her top half—is still in the sands. Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzen tells the Tribune that after the first sphinx they tried to remove crumbled, they spotted what looked like a "giant white buffalo wing" sticking out of the sand and found Nora. He notes that other artifacts on display, including tobacco tins and "cough syrup" bottles that probably held bootleg liquor, show that a lot of people had a "pretty good time" making the silent film. Also on display: a blackened piece of toast from the film camp. "It's definitely not edible anymore," Jenzen says. The 10.5-foot-long sphinx body, the toast, and a sphinx head found during a previous excavation will be unveiled at a 1920s-themed party tonight, reports the Lompoc Record. (Relics from a much earlier age were torched during a Burning Man festival in Israel.)