Holy Moses! Heston’s ‘Ten Commandments’ tablets could fetch $80,000 at auction March 12

The 1956 blockbuster “The Ten Commandments” depicted what was likely the first text download from a cloud — and now its prop tablets are expected to fetch as much as $80,000 in an auction in Los Angeles next week.

The fiberglass tablets, which measure 24 inches high and 12 inches wide, will be up for bids on March 12, according to the auction firm Propstore.

The props, which Charlton Heston as Moses carried as he descended Mount Sinai in the film, were molded by Paramount Pictures scenic artist A.J. Ciraolo “with slight irregularities” to look like chiseled stone, Propstore said.

Filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille required the tablets to resemble the red granite of the Middle East and their inscriptions to be historically accurate.

So potential bidders and inquiring minds want to know: What do the inscriptions say?

“The tablets are in ancient paleo-Hebrew letters,” said Miles Jones, a biblical archaeologist in Kerrville, Texas, who has visited Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia.

“However, there are no recognizable words spelled out on the tablets,” he added. “It is not the Ten Commandments written upon them.”

Mr. Jones said the inscriptions he found at what the Saudis call Mount Horeb are in “the oldest alphabet known in linguistic history” and were derived from Egyptian glyphs. The same inscriptions are found at Joshua’s altar in what is Israel today and come from “the same corpus of alphabetic letters that we find at Mount Sinai.”

But the writing on the Hollywood props are just random characters that don’t spell out any words, he said.

Gibberish? Mr. Jones said, “I prefer gobbledygook.”

Auction lots can be found at https://propstoreauction.com/auctions/info/id/386.