from "The Disappearing Spoon" - the Phrygia part

So you know how everything King Midas touched turned to gold? Well, apparently that's true. Kind of, almost, sort of. 
"A number of different alloys with different ratios of metals all count as bronze, and bronze metals around the ancient world differed in color depending on the percentages of tin, copper, and other elements where the metals were mined. One unique feature of the metallic deposits near Phrygia was the abundance of ores with zinc...What's interesting is that zinc mixed with copper doesn't form bronze; it forms brass. And the earliest known brass foundries existed in, of all places, the part of Asia Minor where Midas once reigned[...]bronze is shiny, but with overtones of copper. You wouldn't mistake it for anything else. The shine of brass is more alluring, more subtle, a little more...golden. Midas's touch, then, was possibly little more than an accidental touch of zinc in the soil of his corner of Asia Minor[...]Naturally, it's impossible to know whether the contemporaries of King Midas believed that his precious zinc-laden bowls and statues and belts were actually gold. But they weren't necessarily the ones making up legends about him. More probably the Greek travelers who later colonized that region of Asia Minor simply grew smitten with the Phrygian 'bronzes,' so much brighter than their own. The tales they sent home could have swelled century by century, until golden-hued brass transmuted to real gold, and a local hero's earthly power transmuted into the supernatural power to create precious metals at a touch. After that, it took only the genius of Ovid to touch up the story for his Metamorphoses and voila: a myth with a more-than-plausible origin."