Give thanks for the tomb raiders

If ever you find yourself in Berlin, there are three places you absolutely must visit. The first two are museums: the Neues Museum, to see the well-worth-the-detour head of Nefertiti; and the Pergamon Museum, so you can offer up a prayer of gratitude for the arrogance of all those 19th-century imperialist looters who understood that the treasures of classical antiquity are far too precious to be wasted on the barbarous cultures which, by geographical accident, have inherited them since.

Yes, perhaps I’m overstating it. ‘Barbarous’ certainly isn’t a term you’d apply, say, to Khaled Assad, the heroic and scholarly Syrian archaeologist who preferred to die rather than betray to his Isis killers the secrets of Palmyra; nor to the refugee from Aleppo described in the Guardian last week being moved almost to tears by the 17th–century wood-panelled interior at the Pergamon which reminded him so much of his childhood.

But what you can’t deny is that if half those ill-gotten treasures now on display at places like the Louvre, the Pergamon and the British Museum were still in situ, they wouldn’t exist at all.