The world being what it is, the key question that the sweetest of our antiquities generates is who owns them. Who owns them. Not, what do they mean. Not, how do we preserve them. Not, how do we protect them when they are in the ground. Not, how do we make them available to scholarship. Nope, it’s all about who owns them. And that usually boils down to the government of the country of origin versus the museum or collector who has them in its possession and doesn’t want to give them up.

Sharon Waxman’s Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, which was just published and which I hasten to add I haven’t read as yet, has received a spate of reviews, an indication that antiquities matter to general readers, not just museum curators, government cultural offices and tomb raiders. Maybe that’s the Indiana Jones Effect. Maybe it has to do with the steady flow of blockbuster exhibitions of ancient art since King Tut demonstrated in 1977 that from the afterlife he still could rule the museum world. Maybe it has to do with their intrinsic beauty.

Or maybe we see a Grecian urn and a door unlocks, as it did for Keats.

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme

The pot or the stele or the amulet or the carving is simultaneously mysterious and informative, opaque and transparent, a subject of study and wild speculation. Who were we? And how does that explain how we got this way?

We don’t have to look to the major museums of New York or London to find the ownership issue arising. The Oregonian’s DK Row documented the very first time a museum has listed an antiquity of questionable provenance on the website of the Association of Art Museum Directors — and it was the Portland Art Museum. American museums set up the website in June to avoid looking like looters or traffickers of artifacts, though it’s a little disconcerting that the Portland Art Museum was the first to list something and that came in October.

The museum’s object is a Ganesha from India, and it is a fine representation of a very prevalent subject in India. There are lots of stories about how Ganesha got his elephant head. My favorite is that the god Shiva created him from his laughter, but he was so attractive that Shiva decided to give him the head of an elephant and a pot belly. As my father used to say, “I wish I’d been born rich instead of so damn good looking.” (Which never failed to make me and my sister howl with laughter.) Anyway, yes, the head, the trunk, the belly, the bowl of sweets in his lap — these are invitations into another world, for both Hindus and non-Hindus. We may not know it, but we non-Hindus need a god dedicated to removing obstacles, too, which is what Ganesha does.

Who should own this Ganesha? Fortunately, so many of them exist that the Portland Art Museum’s sculpture is probably fine here. And anyway, ownership is just never final and forever, no matter how hard we try.

For some good reviews of Loot, you could go to Lee Rosenbaum’s CultureGrrl blog on ArtsJournal, read Hugh Eakin in the New York Times Book Review section (the review ran Sunday), or consult Michael Kammen in the Boston Globe.