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.