Archaeologists digging in the sand dunes of Gaudalupe, California, uncovered a huge sphinx statue from the 1923 film "The Ten Commandments." The plaster sculpture was hidden for more than 90 years before being rediscovered.

A public display of the sphinx may be open as soon as next year if its reconstruction goes according to plan, the executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, Doug Jenzen, said. According to Jenzen, the structure was damaged after being worn down underneath the sand.

The 15-foot-tall mythological creature was one of 21 that was part of the promenade in the Pharaoh's City set for the film. Director Cecil B. DeMille made the silent film in 1923 before remaking his own film with Charlton Heston as Moses in 1956.

"[The 1923 film] was one of the largest movie sets ever made, because they didn't have special effects," Jenzen said to Live Science. "So anything that they wanted to look large, they had to build large."

The body parts of the sphinxes were initially created in Los Angeles and then transported to Guadalupe, about 165 miles away, to be assembled into the large, hollow statues. According to Hollywood legend, the movie crew dynamited the sets after filming and buried the sphinxes. However, Jenzen said there is little real evidence to support the story.

"We'd work during the day, and we'd watch the movie at night to figure out what we were finding," said M. Colleen Hamilton, a senior historical archaeologist with Applied EarthWorks in California who worked on the dig.

The first excavation of the area took place in 1990s when the Dunes Center and the larger Nature Conservancy did an initial comb of the movie site. Jenzen said they found many smaller artifacts like tobacco tins and cough syrup, a common substitute for alcohol during Prohibition, which this film was made during.

"What objects like that tell us is that there wasn't a whole lot to do at the making of this movie," Jenzen said. "These guys had a lot of really good times before takes."

The second excavation began in 2012, largely informed by watching "The Ten Commandments" closely, which led to the sphinx's discovery.

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