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Kobol is the name of a fictional planet in the movie and television series Battlestar Galactica. As depicted in the original 1978-79 incarnation, Kobol was a planet orbiting a star which is an irregular variable, and its system is immediately adjacent to a magnetic void. In the 2004 series, Kobol appears to be a standard class m planet in a regular solar system, and its ruins appear to be more Greco-Roman in their influence then Egyptian.
According to the original movie and series, Kobol was the original homeworld of all humans.
Although largely unexplained in any backstory sense, it is generally agreed upon and understood that the population of Kobol was space-faring; that their population had likely reached the limits inherent in occupying a single planet; that there may have been other disasters or factors (such as Kobol's sun being a pulsar) which motivated them to leave Kobol. Eden is revealed to be an actual city on the planet, and was "the first to fall" to some unknown cataclysm according to Commander Adama. Also unexplained was the culture of then-Kobolian society and their division into 13 distinct tribes.
Twelve of these groups travelled through the magnetic void and eventually settled on a group of inhabitable planets in a common solar system. These became the colonies depicted in the series and were known collectively as The Twelve Colonies of Man.
For some unexplained reason, the thirteenth tribe presumably travelled a greater distance and in the opposite direction, settling on Earth.
At the time the original series began, there had been no contact between the thirteenth tribe and the Twelve Colonies of Man, and both the existence of Earth and the thirteenth tribe were largely considered a myth.
Kobol is rediscovered in the Original Series episode "Lost Planet of the Gods", which depicts at least part of the planet as being a desert, with ruins similar (or possibly identical) to the Egyptian Pyramids of Giza; parts of the episode were actually filmed on location at Giza.
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