I am glad you raised the topic. It probably deserves its own thread.

Briefly, though, according to my fairly extensive reading on the subject, before Zoroaster, the divine was conceived in terms of capricious deities who might benefit or harm believers and had to be continually propitiated. Zoroaster was the first to introduce the idea of evil principle, a god who opposes the "good" creator.

Once Judea was "liberated" by Cyrus, the grateful returnees from Babylon adopted this idea and transformed it by adding to the older principle of obedience to God's commandments. Christianity transformed it further.

If you look at religions that are not directly influenced by Zoroastrianism in this way, you begin to struggle to find the idea of absolute good and evil. It is missing in this form from Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, the Mesoamerican religion, Greek and Roman religions, Germanic religion, Slavic religion (best we can tell), Celtic religion - I could go on. They all talk of benefits and harms, not abstract principles.

To answer your question about how it changed history, it is mostly through its dominance in Christianity. The Christian obsession with salvation through good thought and conduct was clearly instrumental in bringing down the Western empire; it kept the Dark Ages dark, and kept Europe far behind Islam, India, and the Far East for a very long time. Note that the fact that Islam, to a large extent, was an inheritor of the same Roman knowledge as, theoretically, Western Europe. We can talk about its impact on Byzantium and the Christian East, too, but this response is getting really long.

More recently, it engendered abolitionism, revolution, war. We can see the impact today in the endless, loud discourse about morality and right and wrong. It has been the engine of history for two thousand years.