Sharon Waxman, a former culture reporter with the New York Times, visits the great museums of the world and finds them, with regard to their collections of antiquities, in a state of turmoil. Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt want their tombs and their marbles, artifacts, and jewels returned. The natives have gone past mere complaining; they are suing the museums, arresting smugglers, squeezing out venerable dealers.

In the most exceptional (and tragic) case, Marion True, the former antiquities curator and classicist of the J. Paul Getty Museum, was charged with crimes by Italy and Greece. Though the Greek charges were dismissed and she is fighting the Italian charge, they have damaged her brilliant career.

Given the threat of further prosecution, not to mention the deadening hand of political correctness that weighs on dealers, legal traffic in antiquities has all but stopped. If you want to buy a decent sarcophagus these days, you had better seek out a smuggler.

In Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, Waxman, who previously wrote a book on Hollywood, takes a panoramic approach, recounting the stories of four great museums in the West, their ancient treasures, and those who believe the antiquities should be returned. (Curiously, she omits sites in Peru and other nations that have lost pre-Columbian treasures.)

It may come as a mild shock to the casual museumgoer that institutions like the Louvre, the Metropolitan ­Museum of Art in New York, and the British ­Museum are stocked with loot, but on that score Waxman leaves no doubt. British diplomat Thomas Bruce, better known as Lord Elgin, first assembled a team at the Acropolis in 1801, ostensibly to make sketches and plaster casts. Instead, they ripped the sculptures out of the Parthenon.

If Waxman delivers a scoop, it is that such shenanigans continued well past the era in which imperialist excesses were greeted with a throaty chortle. Thomas Hoving, the bold director of the Met during the 1960s and ’70s, admitted to the author that he kept a Rolodex of the “best smugglers” and that his preferred route for secreting contraband out of Italy was to load his kids onto a carefully plumped mattress in the back of a station wagon and make for the Swiss border.

As disturbing as such accounts are, the world would know far less about ancient  civilizations  today had excavation and interpretation been left entirely to the host countries. Consider the saga of the Lydian Hoard, a cache of artifacts the Met had quietly acquired in the late ’60s. For years, Hoving and his successors declined to confirm they had purchased these objects, much less how they might have gone about it. Then, in 1984, an intrepid Turkish journalist visiting the Met chanced to see the suspect display, foggily labeled EAST GREEK TREASURE. Turkey brought suit, and after six more years, the Met admitted that the Hoard had been acquired clandestinely.

A victory for Turkish ­archaeology buffs? Not quite. In its native land, the Hoard eventually ended up in a decrepit, one-room museum, and during a five-year span was seen by precisely 769 people. Or so it seemed. Alas, it turned out that the masterpiece among these artifacts was a fake. The real one had been sold on the black market by a Turkish curator whose devotion to his patrimony was overcome by his gambling addiction.

Such capers remind us that Western imperialists saved as much as they savaged. It took Napoleon’s army, which traveled with 167 scientists and other savants, to discover the Rosetta stone, and a language expert back in France to decipher it. At the time, Egyptian peasants were camped at the mouths of tombs, living among the mummies.

This hardly justifies the Europeans’ reflexive racialism. (Egyptians were forbidden from even studying archaeology by French officials in Egypt.) And plundering that destroyed the integrity of monuments was wrong by any standard.

However, as Waxman reminds us, it is only recently that the term spoils of war acquired a negative connotation. And the world is indisputably richer for the existence of museums that contrast the great civilizations under one roof.

Waxman visits with numerous curators in host countries whose attitude is that their own lack of facilities or expertise hardly gives Europeans a right to steal. But there is little sense, as the chief Egyptologist of the Louvre argues, in returning objects to darkened tombs. Egyptians may be unhappy, but their own collections still dwarf those in the West. The number of pharaonic objects in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is estimated at 120,000, many of them yellowing, cracked, and unlabeled.

Furthermore, prove­nance is less clear than it may seem. Contemporary Egyptians are not the direct descendants of the pharaoh’s army, nor are Turks related to the ancient Greeks. While Unesco now forbids the illegal removal of newly excavated finds, it would be impractical and also undesirable to compel the return of treasure seized when standards were different.

Waxman sensibly suggests that museums be more candid about how they acquired their collections. Two centuries later, the British Museum has no reason to obscure the details of Lord Elgin’s heist. He is as much a part of history as the marbles he made off with.

Unhappily, Waxman cannot make up her mind on the question of restitution that lies at the heart of Loot. On each point of contention, she quotes every possible source and all but drowns the reader in competing opinions. Her ­attempts to sum up are indecisive. Thus she writes, “Perhaps [antiquities] should be returned. But perhaps they should not be returned just yet.” Her narrative suffers from a similar inability to select. Having overfilled her notebook with interviews, she disgorges every one. The result is something like that Egyptian museum, crowded with gems but leaving the reader with a feeling of exhaustion and clutter.