The enormous sets of ancient Egypt have become a Hollywood legend in themselves. The "City of the Pharaohs" was constructed of wood and plaster in the Guadalupe Dunes, an 18-mile stretch of coastal sand 170 miles north of L.A. The sets featured four 35-foot-tall statues of the Pharaoh Ramses, 21 five-ton sphinxes, and city walls over 120 feet high. An army of 2,500 actors, extras, carpenters, plasterers, painters, cooks, staff, and film crew members inhabited the set for three months, housed in a virtual army camp that featured nearly 1,000 tents. (3,500 animals, used in recreating the scenes of ancient Egypt, were housed in a huge corral downwind of the camp.) When shooting wrapped, Cecil B. DeMille simply had the massive Egyptian city sets bulldozed, and buried in a huge pit beneath the sand, where they remain to this day. For years, the legendary "Lost City of DeMille" was spoken of by locals in Guadalupe who had worked on the film set. Artifacts from the Egyptian sets were found in the dunes, and can sometimes be found in local houses in the area. (DeMille even said in his autobiography, "If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America.") In 1983, docume

Most of the chariot crashes in the prologue were real and unplanned.

The Egyptian set seen in the prologue was, in reality, an enormous construction, and was actually considerably larger than the Babylon sets in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, to which they are often compared.

Julia Faye, who plays the Pharaoh's wife, also played Elisheba, Aaron's wife, in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments.

During one day of the filming of the Exodus scenes, about sixty bit players were injured in chariot crashes. Most went right back to work after getting bandaged up.