1. it's the BBC, they are biased towards that type article 2. it's totally non-obvious and the message is hidden (as per the article) 3. arabs, were obsessed

1. it's the BBC, they are biased towards that type article 2. it's totally non-obvious and the message is hidden (as per the article) 3. arabs, were obsessed (also experts) by geometric patterns and those pattern were also their early gods. so they would have produced many goods with nice patterns on them. 4. it looks nice, and i'm sure they would have bought or stole those items from arabs. 5. pascal's wager, they could be hedging their bets. 6. they were probably pre Bluetooth, where he unified the viking religion to be Christianity.