[5] Dede Korkut is a heroic dastan, also known as the Oghuznama among the Oghuz,[6] which starts in Central Asia, continues in Anatolia, and centers most of its action in the Caucasus.

[10] In the 14th century, a federation of Turcoman tribesmen, the Aq Qoyunlu, established a confederation centered in eastern Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq and western Iran.

In the dastans, Dede Korkut appears as the aksakal [literally 'white-beard,' the respected elder], the advisor or sage, solving the difficulties faced by tribal members.

[14] For example, the story of a monster named Tepegöz "Goggle-Eye" bears enough resemblance to the encounter with the Cyclops in Homer's Odyssey that it is believed to have been influenced by the Greek epic or to have one common ancient Anatolian root.

In Dede Korkut's description, the athletic skills of Turks, both men and women, were described to be "first-rate," especially in horse-riding, archery, cirit (javelin throw), wrestling and polo, which are considered Turkish national sports.

[18] However, the manuscript also boasts a couple of Persian word groups, such as Dāvūd-ı nebī (Prophet Dawud), Şāh-ı merdān ("shah of the valiant", Ali), taḫt-ı Mıṣır (the throne of Egypt) and others.

The "Bamsi Beyrek" chapter of Dede Korkut preserves almost verbatim the immensely popular Central Asian dastan Alpamysh, dating from an even earlier time.

However, there are also orthographical, lexical, and grammatical structures peculiar to Chaghatai, which shows that the original work was written in the area between the Syr Darya and Anatolia, and later rewritten in Safavid Iran in the second half of the 16th century.

Geoffrey Lewis dates it fairly early in the 15th century,[27] with two layers of text: a substratum of older oral traditions related to conflicts between the Oghuz and the Pechenegs and Kipchaks and an outer covering of references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Aq Qoyunlu.

[28] At least one of the stories (Chapter 8) existed in writing in the early 14th century, from an unpublished Arabic history, ibn al-Dawadari's Durar al-Tijan, written in the Mamluk Sultanate sometime between 1309 and 1340.

This is especially true of an epic book such as this, which is a product of a long series of narrators, any of whom could have made alterations and additions, right down to the two 16th-century scribes who authored the oldest extant manuscripts.

[32] The majority of the Turkic peoples and lands described in the Book of Dede Korkut were part of the Soviet Union from 1920 until 1991, and thus most of the research and interest originated there.

The Turkish historian Hasan Bülent Paksoy argues that after Joseph Stalin solidified his grip on power in the Soviet Union, especially in the early 1950s, a taboo on Turkology was firmly established.

He observed that the first full-text Russian edition of the Book of Dede Korkut, by Azerbaijani academicians Hamid Arasly and M.G.Tahmasib and based on the Barthold translation of the 1920s, was published on a limited basis only in 1939 and again in 1950.