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.