Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments opens with the hazy image of a sphinx’s head. One of the Pharaoh’s workers stands in front of it, possibly on the sphinx’s feet, whipping the people tasked with pulling the statue across the shot, from one side of the Pharaoh’s temple to the other.
The film tells the story of the Israelites flight from the City of the Pharaoh, and the crossing of the Red Sea. But while it depicts vast desert, and is littered with monuments, pyramids, and carved sphinxes; what appears to be Ancient Egypt is actually an elaborate set, built on a ten dollar plot of land in California. Studio executives had told DeMille that filming in Egypt would be too expensive. He commissioned French Art Nouveau designer Paul Iribe to design the set, which included a 36-story temple, four Pharaoh statues that stood at over 10 meters tall, and 21 sphinxes. It was expensive and complicated to build, involving over 1,000 workers, and a vastly exceeded budget of over $1,000,000. When filming wrapped, and with moving the set proving impossible, rumor has it that DeMille ordered it be “dynamited” and buried under the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes. A lion with the wings of an eagle and the head of a woman, a falcon, a cat, or a sheep; or a wingless figure with the body of a lion and the head of a pharaoh, the sphinx settles at entrances guarding temples, monuments, cities, palaces, hotels, and golf courses. It symbolizes at once royalty and sacred status, vengeance, guardianship, and shrewdness. In Ancient Egypt, the sphinx was a representation of the Sun God, Horus of the Horizon. In Greek mythology, the sphinx posed a riddle to those passing the rocks outside the city of Thebes, and devoured anyone who couldn’t answer: “What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three feet in the evening?”
The word “sphinx” is thought to come from the Ancient Greek verb “to squeeze”, named for the strangulation that would follow a failed riddle. It is also thought to be a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name “shesepankh,” meaning “living image,” in reference to the stone the form is carved from, the living rock, and the sphinx being the living image of the Gods. A living image can be in reference to being cast in the same mould, the spitting image of another. It can also be an image that continuously shifts shape and meaning — as it lives — accruing new myth and legend around it as it is built upon both structurally and metaphorically. Caring little for the stability any definition might offer, the sphinx lends itself to repeated reinvention, an enigma perhaps best understood as a sort of bootleg—reproduced unsanctioned and ascribed to no one—holding its own layered riddle within its form.
Ancient sphinx traveled from Egypt to Greece along trade routes, showing up in Indian mythology (a guardian over gateways and doors warding off evil and relieving people of their sins), adorning monuments and the bells of pagodas in Thailand and Myanmar, appearing again as a symbol of guardianship during the Renaissance — with breasts, pearls, and an elaborate hairdo — as well as being adopted into fountains with water pouring out of its mouth, as if it is dribbling, or throwing up. Sphinx’s cropped up in the paintings and literature of the Decadent movement, which was characterised by an aesthetic of excess and fantasy, with one appearing as a femme fatale, trying to seduce Oedipus in Gustave Moreau’s 1864 painting. In Victorian England, Oscar Wilde took a similar view in his poem, The Sphinx, with the titular character described as a ‘murderess’ of those she desires, defeated only by the abstinence of a Christian man — “Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!”
The sphinx has continually been applied anew to represent various stories and civilizations, evoking feelings of comfort and fear, reverence, and vaguely defined displays of strength and wonder. In recent years, since the turn of the 20th century, sphinx’s have continued to find places to sit, she/he/they/it appearing outside temples, guarding monuments, casinos, and decorating department store atriums. They have also appeared in various artworks. In Riddles of the Sphinx, a 1977 experimental film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, a series of chapters examine the role of the mother, and the inner and outward negotiations required to navigate domestic life. Each chapter is interrupted or bookended by sequences of Mulvey recounting the myth of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, disrupting the narrative structure and challenging the myth’s femme fatale story. In 2014, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was ‘confected’ by Kara Walker, for a public project installed at the Domino Sugar Factory, Brooklyn, with the subtitle: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.
The central form was a close to 80-foot long, sugar-coated sphinx evoking the Southern Mammy archetype, with fifteen ‘attendants’, enlarged versions of contemporary blackamoors produced in China. The work took the form of a sphinx as Walker realised the need for a monument that was recognisable and loaded, capable of holding multiple meanings. The sphinx was intended as a temporary statue, installed for a matter of months before it was dismantled — Walker keeping one of its feet, a piece of history, a sweet ruin.
In 2023, Lauren Halsey installed a temple flanked by four sphinxes on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each sphinx has the face of a member of her family, the columns carry portraits of artist friends from South Central Los Angeles, where she is based, and the wall inscriptions on the temple form an archive of Black popular culture, signage, grassroots organisations, statements of protest, and affirmation. The installation, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), resembles the structure of the Temple of Dendur — built in Roman Egypt in 10 BCE, and ‘given’ to The Met in 1963 — which is decorated with elaborate relief carvings of goddesses and gods.
Since the early 2000s, there have been repeat sightings of sphinx of Giza across China. One in the Lanzhou Silk Road Cultural Relics Park, which also has a full-size Parthenon; one in Anhui province, its head painted in blue and gold, with drawn-on eyebrows; a snow replica built for a snow sculpture expo; as well as one in Hebei province, said to have been built for filming purposes. It was ‘beheaded’ after Egypt complained to UNESCO on the grounds of the Great Sphinx of Hebei being a violation of intellectual property, and it receiving too many visitors — “Eventually, China must remove the fake Sphinx”, the general manager of Giza Pyramid Plateau told a British newspaper — but a few years later, the head was reattached, and the Sphinx continues to watch from its perch.
Whether so-called fakes, replicas, or models, which have been gifted, stolen, or dynamited, the sphinx lives many lives. Ancient Egyptian monuments have been mimicked in European architecture since the Renaissance, in tandem with British and French imperial plundering projects. In the 1800s, Cleopatra’s Needle — one of two actual 3500 year-old Egyptian obelisks offered as a gift from the Khedive of Egypt to Britain — was installed in London (the other in Central Park, New York) flanked by two bronze sphinxes designed by Victorian architect George John Vuillamy. In an accidental confirmation of their efforts in imitation, the sphinxes were installed back-to-front, artefact and artifice side-by-side, or rather face-to-face. The original symbolism of the obelisk had already been augmented when its context changed, from Ancient Egypt to Victorian England, the addition of a pair of re- or mis-interpreted sphinxes only adds to the unstable reference.
The living image of the sphinx appeared in Egyptian Revival architecture, and was adopted into Masonic buildings as a symbol of mystery. Sphinxes guard temples and warn freemasons of the importance of secrecy. The Daughters of Sphinx, an organisation within freemasonry that welcomes women, optimises the potential of its image as an opportunity to sell merch — encouraging members to purchase “distinctive regalia”, like the ‘Daughters of Sphinx Fez Hat’, which can be embellished with gold silk lettering or rhinestones for around $100. In London, one of the most theatrical and layered examples of Egyptian Revival architecture is the Egyptian Escalator at Harrods, the luxury department store, which was commissioned by Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1992, and designed be artist William Mitchell. It includes more than a dozen sphinxes in stone and gold, each with Al-Fayed’s likeness (a spitting image). In the Egyptian Hall, you are greeted by an imposing gold sphinx, and as you ascend the escalator, there is a second gold sphinx form, with the body of a kneeling woman. Sphinx-like heads top columns, the undersides of the escalators hold bas reliefs of the goddess Isis, as ruler of the world; and a stone sphinx perches on a plinth, its paws resting on the Harrods building. It is the most imposing versions of the sphinx that carry Al-Fayed’s likeness, including a set of statues in the Egyptian Hall. “[It’s] like a mini Karnak” he said in an interview. “It’s a listed monument, so they can’t take me away, they can’t.”
Luxor Las Vegas, a casino hotel developed by Circus Circus Enterprises, was built in 1993 as a black glass pyramid fronted by a sphinx, which mimics the Great Sphinx of Giza. The body of the sphinx is the resort’s porte-cochère, and when the casino hotel opened there was a ‘Karnak Lake’ at its feet, with computer-controlled fountains that synchronized with lasers that shot out from the eyes of the sphinx, but it is now a car park.
The pyramid is 3/4 the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which initially stood at close to 150 metres, the world’s tallest built structure for 3,800 years, and the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is topped with the world’s most powerful light, 42.3 billion candela — basically 42.3 billion wax candles — which can be seen from space. When Luxor Las Vegas first opened, Circus Circus had worked with Egyptologists in developing the theme, installing fiberglass and plaster replicas of Egyptian artifacts that could be viewed from an indoor ‘Nile River’ boat ride. They wanted to give the casino hotel an air of high culture, inviting guests to enjoy a side of ‘museum’ at King Tut’s Tomb — although the Great Pyramid of Giza was Khufu’s tomb, not Tutankhamun’s — as they tried their luck on the slots. Referencing Ancient Egypt, and the awe-inspiring architecture of the pyramids, invites an atmosphere of legacy to a brand new building, and is a sort-of non-denominational nod to the imposing scale of religious architecture. But invoking the living image of the sphinx seems to have invoked some other spirits, too, perhaps because of some clumsy references.
Although the Great Sphinx of Giza stands alone, historians and remaining hieroglyphs show that when built they sat in pairs. Rumor has it that the single sphinx in front of the Las Vegas pyramid has cursed the Luxor, and made it more haunted than any other hotel on the strip thanks to the number of murders, suicides, and unexplained deaths. On ‘ghostcitytours.com’ there is a list of rooms and their paranormal activity: ‘the poltergeist room’ and multiple rooms haunted by ‘the deadly blonde’, a ghost said to strangle guests (à la the sphinx herself).
As the hotel has changed hands, it has expanded, been renovated, and the Egyptian theme has become more and more diluted, perhaps down to changing tastes — King Tut’s Tomb being replaced with ‘Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition’ — or as a measure against the hauntings and deaths at the hotel. According to the hotel’s MGM president: “We’re not a British museum with ancient artifacts, we’re a casino-resort”. But Luxor Las Vegas has maintained the sphinx, its face painted like that of a Mummy, with blue and gold-striped hair — a suggestion of what might have been, and/or a splicing of historical references.
It is unclear whether the people of Guadalupe, where Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘Lost City’ has been buried for over a century, have experienced such hauntings. In summer 2012, I ended up on Guadalupe Street, stopping in the city with self-proclaimed “small town charm” when my friend and I detoured on a cliché road trip down Highway 1. Walking into NAPA Auto Parts shop, we were drawn in by a chaotic mix of tools, wires, car exhausts, sombreros, and what looked like a Plaster of Paris foot and a chariot. The proprietor of the shop, John Perry, one of the original Beach Boys (or so he said), and a custodian of Guadalupe’s history told us that the foot belonged to a sphinx buried under the nearby dunes. Locals had been digging pieces out from the sand since it was buried in the 1920s, including two sphinx heads that now had pride of place on a nearby golf course.
The set remained unknown to anyone outside the local area until the 1980s, when a group of film nerds set out on an expedition. They were inspired by DeMille’s autobiography in which he wrote: “If, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe… I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization… extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America…”
Over the last forty years, hieroglyphs, bas reliefs, and another sphinx head, have been recovered and restored with the help of the Guadalupe Dunes Center. What was built as the set of a fictional city has gone from the realm of Hollywood lore, to what is now a protected historical site. Archaelogists dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, and although there isn’t a belief that Egyptian civilisation extended to the Pacific Coast, the living image of the sphinx and its lost city animates the dunes.
The film tells the story of the Israelites flight from the City of the Pharaoh, and the crossing of the Red Sea. But while it depicts vast desert, and is littered with monuments, pyramids, and carved sphinxes; what appears to be Ancient Egypt is actually an elaborate set, built on a ten dollar plot of land in California. Studio executives had told DeMille that filming in Egypt would be too expensive. He commissioned French Art Nouveau designer Paul Iribe to design the set, which included a 36-story temple, four Pharaoh statues that stood at over 10 meters tall, and 21 sphinxes. It was expensive and complicated to build, involving over 1,000 workers, and a vastly exceeded budget of over $1,000,000. When filming wrapped, and with moving the set proving impossible, rumor has it that DeMille ordered it be “dynamited” and buried under the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes. A lion with the wings of an eagle and the head of a woman, a falcon, a cat, or a sheep; or a wingless figure with the body of a lion and the head of a pharaoh, the sphinx settles at entrances guarding temples, monuments, cities, palaces, hotels, and golf courses. It symbolizes at once royalty and sacred status, vengeance, guardianship, and shrewdness. In Ancient Egypt, the sphinx was a representation of the Sun God, Horus of the Horizon. In Greek mythology, the sphinx posed a riddle to those passing the rocks outside the city of Thebes, and devoured anyone who couldn’t answer: “What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three feet in the evening?”
The word “sphinx” is thought to come from the Ancient Greek verb “to squeeze”, named for the strangulation that would follow a failed riddle. It is also thought to be a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name “shesepankh,” meaning “living image,” in reference to the stone the form is carved from, the living rock, and the sphinx being the living image of the Gods. A living image can be in reference to being cast in the same mould, the spitting image of another. It can also be an image that continuously shifts shape and meaning — as it lives — accruing new myth and legend around it as it is built upon both structurally and metaphorically. Caring little for the stability any definition might offer, the sphinx lends itself to repeated reinvention, an enigma perhaps best understood as a sort of bootleg—reproduced unsanctioned and ascribed to no one—holding its own layered riddle within its form.
Ancient sphinx traveled from Egypt to Greece along trade routes, showing up in Indian mythology (a guardian over gateways and doors warding off evil and relieving people of their sins), adorning monuments and the bells of pagodas in Thailand and Myanmar, appearing again as a symbol of guardianship during the Renaissance — with breasts, pearls, and an elaborate hairdo — as well as being adopted into fountains with water pouring out of its mouth, as if it is dribbling, or throwing up. Sphinx’s cropped up in the paintings and literature of the Decadent movement, which was characterised by an aesthetic of excess and fantasy, with one appearing as a femme fatale, trying to seduce Oedipus in Gustave Moreau’s 1864 painting. In Victorian England, Oscar Wilde took a similar view in his poem, The Sphinx, with the titular character described as a ‘murderess’ of those she desires, defeated only by the abstinence of a Christian man — “Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and half animal!”
The sphinx has continually been applied anew to represent various stories and civilizations, evoking feelings of comfort and fear, reverence, and vaguely defined displays of strength and wonder. In recent years, since the turn of the 20th century, sphinx’s have continued to find places to sit, she/he/they/it appearing outside temples, guarding monuments, casinos, and decorating department store atriums. They have also appeared in various artworks. In Riddles of the Sphinx, a 1977 experimental film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, a series of chapters examine the role of the mother, and the inner and outward negotiations required to navigate domestic life. Each chapter is interrupted or bookended by sequences of Mulvey recounting the myth of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, disrupting the narrative structure and challenging the myth’s femme fatale story. In 2014, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was ‘confected’ by Kara Walker, for a public project installed at the Domino Sugar Factory, Brooklyn, with the subtitle: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.
The central form was a close to 80-foot long, sugar-coated sphinx evoking the Southern Mammy archetype, with fifteen ‘attendants’, enlarged versions of contemporary blackamoors produced in China. The work took the form of a sphinx as Walker realised the need for a monument that was recognisable and loaded, capable of holding multiple meanings. The sphinx was intended as a temporary statue, installed for a matter of months before it was dismantled — Walker keeping one of its feet, a piece of history, a sweet ruin.
In 2023, Lauren Halsey installed a temple flanked by four sphinxes on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each sphinx has the face of a member of her family, the columns carry portraits of artist friends from South Central Los Angeles, where she is based, and the wall inscriptions on the temple form an archive of Black popular culture, signage, grassroots organisations, statements of protest, and affirmation. The installation, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), resembles the structure of the Temple of Dendur — built in Roman Egypt in 10 BCE, and ‘given’ to The Met in 1963 — which is decorated with elaborate relief carvings of goddesses and gods.
Since the early 2000s, there have been repeat sightings of sphinx of Giza across China. One in the Lanzhou Silk Road Cultural Relics Park, which also has a full-size Parthenon; one in Anhui province, its head painted in blue and gold, with drawn-on eyebrows; a snow replica built for a snow sculpture expo; as well as one in Hebei province, said to have been built for filming purposes. It was ‘beheaded’ after Egypt complained to UNESCO on the grounds of the Great Sphinx of Hebei being a violation of intellectual property, and it receiving too many visitors — “Eventually, China must remove the fake Sphinx”, the general manager of Giza Pyramid Plateau told a British newspaper — but a few years later, the head was reattached, and the Sphinx continues to watch from its perch.
Whether so-called fakes, replicas, or models, which have been gifted, stolen, or dynamited, the sphinx lives many lives. Ancient Egyptian monuments have been mimicked in European architecture since the Renaissance, in tandem with British and French imperial plundering projects. In the 1800s, Cleopatra’s Needle — one of two actual 3500 year-old Egyptian obelisks offered as a gift from the Khedive of Egypt to Britain — was installed in London (the other in Central Park, New York) flanked by two bronze sphinxes designed by Victorian architect George John Vuillamy. In an accidental confirmation of their efforts in imitation, the sphinxes were installed back-to-front, artefact and artifice side-by-side, or rather face-to-face. The original symbolism of the obelisk had already been augmented when its context changed, from Ancient Egypt to Victorian England, the addition of a pair of re- or mis-interpreted sphinxes only adds to the unstable reference.
The living image of the sphinx appeared in Egyptian Revival architecture, and was adopted into Masonic buildings as a symbol of mystery. Sphinxes guard temples and warn freemasons of the importance of secrecy. The Daughters of Sphinx, an organisation within freemasonry that welcomes women, optimises the potential of its image as an opportunity to sell merch — encouraging members to purchase “distinctive regalia”, like the ‘Daughters of Sphinx Fez Hat’, which can be embellished with gold silk lettering or rhinestones for around $100. In London, one of the most theatrical and layered examples of Egyptian Revival architecture is the Egyptian Escalator at Harrods, the luxury department store, which was commissioned by Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1992, and designed be artist William Mitchell. It includes more than a dozen sphinxes in stone and gold, each with Al-Fayed’s likeness (a spitting image). In the Egyptian Hall, you are greeted by an imposing gold sphinx, and as you ascend the escalator, there is a second gold sphinx form, with the body of a kneeling woman. Sphinx-like heads top columns, the undersides of the escalators hold bas reliefs of the goddess Isis, as ruler of the world; and a stone sphinx perches on a plinth, its paws resting on the Harrods building. It is the most imposing versions of the sphinx that carry Al-Fayed’s likeness, including a set of statues in the Egyptian Hall. “[It’s] like a mini Karnak” he said in an interview. “It’s a listed monument, so they can’t take me away, they can’t.”
Luxor Las Vegas, a casino hotel developed by Circus Circus Enterprises, was built in 1993 as a black glass pyramid fronted by a sphinx, which mimics the Great Sphinx of Giza. The body of the sphinx is the resort’s porte-cochère, and when the casino hotel opened there was a ‘Karnak Lake’ at its feet, with computer-controlled fountains that synchronized with lasers that shot out from the eyes of the sphinx, but it is now a car park.
The pyramid is 3/4 the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which initially stood at close to 150 metres, the world’s tallest built structure for 3,800 years, and the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is topped with the world’s most powerful light, 42.3 billion candela — basically 42.3 billion wax candles — which can be seen from space. When Luxor Las Vegas first opened, Circus Circus had worked with Egyptologists in developing the theme, installing fiberglass and plaster replicas of Egyptian artifacts that could be viewed from an indoor ‘Nile River’ boat ride. They wanted to give the casino hotel an air of high culture, inviting guests to enjoy a side of ‘museum’ at King Tut’s Tomb — although the Great Pyramid of Giza was Khufu’s tomb, not Tutankhamun’s — as they tried their luck on the slots. Referencing Ancient Egypt, and the awe-inspiring architecture of the pyramids, invites an atmosphere of legacy to a brand new building, and is a sort-of non-denominational nod to the imposing scale of religious architecture. But invoking the living image of the sphinx seems to have invoked some other spirits, too, perhaps because of some clumsy references.
Although the Great Sphinx of Giza stands alone, historians and remaining hieroglyphs show that when built they sat in pairs. Rumor has it that the single sphinx in front of the Las Vegas pyramid has cursed the Luxor, and made it more haunted than any other hotel on the strip thanks to the number of murders, suicides, and unexplained deaths. On ‘ghostcitytours.com’ there is a list of rooms and their paranormal activity: ‘the poltergeist room’ and multiple rooms haunted by ‘the deadly blonde’, a ghost said to strangle guests (à la the sphinx herself).
As the hotel has changed hands, it has expanded, been renovated, and the Egyptian theme has become more and more diluted, perhaps down to changing tastes — King Tut’s Tomb being replaced with ‘Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition’ — or as a measure against the hauntings and deaths at the hotel. According to the hotel’s MGM president: “We’re not a British museum with ancient artifacts, we’re a casino-resort”. But Luxor Las Vegas has maintained the sphinx, its face painted like that of a Mummy, with blue and gold-striped hair — a suggestion of what might have been, and/or a splicing of historical references.
It is unclear whether the people of Guadalupe, where Cecil B. DeMille’s ‘Lost City’ has been buried for over a century, have experienced such hauntings. In summer 2012, I ended up on Guadalupe Street, stopping in the city with self-proclaimed “small town charm” when my friend and I detoured on a cliché road trip down Highway 1. Walking into NAPA Auto Parts shop, we were drawn in by a chaotic mix of tools, wires, car exhausts, sombreros, and what looked like a Plaster of Paris foot and a chariot. The proprietor of the shop, John Perry, one of the original Beach Boys (or so he said), and a custodian of Guadalupe’s history told us that the foot belonged to a sphinx buried under the nearby dunes. Locals had been digging pieces out from the sand since it was buried in the 1920s, including two sphinx heads that now had pride of place on a nearby golf course.
The set remained unknown to anyone outside the local area until the 1980s, when a group of film nerds set out on an expedition. They were inspired by DeMille’s autobiography in which he wrote: “If, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe… I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization… extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America…”
Over the last forty years, hieroglyphs, bas reliefs, and another sphinx head, have been recovered and restored with the help of the Guadalupe Dunes Center. What was built as the set of a fictional city has gone from the realm of Hollywood lore, to what is now a protected historical site. Archaelogists dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, and although there isn’t a belief that Egyptian civilisation extended to the Pacific Coast, the living image of the sphinx and its lost city animates the dunes.