Is Prophecies the original guild wars? Or is it an expansion?

Title says it all

Prophecies is the original. Factions and Nightfall follow Prophecies. Eye of the North is the only "expansion".

As Pwnd says. Prophesies was the first and original game/campaign. Factions and Nightfall are standalone campaigns aswell (you can own and play them without having Prophesies) and not expansions as such. Eye of the North is the only actual expansion, as you need at least 1 of the 3 campaigns.
Storywise and also the order they were released in is Prophesies -> Factions -> Nightfall -> EotN

But you need all od them to really enjoy the game.
Everyone without any of those immediately quits GW or decides to buy the rest soon or later.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Prophecies yes, and it went live April 28, 2005. Nearly 7 years ago. No hard mode, but normal mode was tougher. Loot was much better. The release was very buggy. Hench got stuck, ran away, and once mine ran up an invisible ramp into the sky and disappeared. In spite of bugs, it was a blast because nobody knew what they were doing nor cared.

There was a beta before that and traces of an earlier game design still remain. If you want a nominal target date for GW 2, April 28 good as any.

So if I buy the Guild Wars Trilogy (which comes with Guild Wars, Factions, and Nightfall) it would come with Prophecies, correct? Because "Guild Wars" would be considered prophecies, right?

Yes, the game that is simply titled "Guild Wars" with no subtitle is GW:Prophecies.
It was given that subtitle after the release of GW:Factions, because ANET felt that each campaign needed a subtitle to avoid confusion.

Yes. Sort of like Star Wars became "A New Hope" after The Empire Strikes Back was released.
................

My Guild Wars just says Guild Wars, it was a pretty big box of stuff when it came out (atleast the one I got) so it was pretty damn cool. When all the Prophecies talk started back in the day I was pretty confused at first :P

I wish there was a separate server, with only Prophecies, ahhhh,....those were the days...

Those days were a lot of fun. The best part was that players actually played togther!

Sorry but have to say that is bull crap, it was not "very buggy" at all and it had the smoothest release of any mmo type game around, did you know that GWs has had less downtime in 7 years than WoW had in it's 1st few days?

If you go and check the old patch notes you'll see there are relatively few "fixes" compared to what one might expect based on your comment. A few hench issues, which were map(pathing/object placement) issues is nothing, you can still get them stuck from time to time ;p but they are smarter now.

On difficulty, i do think about this often, and maybe it's just due to the fact that most people ran through the game with crappy armour/weapons whereas now you can get the top armour within a few hours, instead of needing to go through the entire campaign to Droknar's to get the max. Plus a far smaller skill selection etc. So this i would say is why it seemed a lot tougher, tougher than you'd find HM these days really in most zones. Being able to boost your armour lvls through the wazoo is pretty meh, but with a dual class system it's crazy hard to balance(which is why there is none in GW2) with the amount of skills we have at our disposal these days, and Shadow Form should just be removed from the game imo, or given a much higher recharge, like Spell Breaker.

Yep, the Trilogy is everything except Eye of the North (EoTN). If you want the Hall of Monuments you'll want EoTN, so compare the prices in your shops between getting Trilogy + EoTN or Complete Pack (which is all four GW releases).

See:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Trilogy
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild...ete_Collection