The Tabula Chimica (Chemical Table) is the Latin translation of an alchemical work by Muhammad ibn Umail (also known as Senior Zadith, son of Hamuel), an Arabic alchemist who lived during the caliphate of Al-Hakam II, who reigned in Spain from 961 to 976. Muhammad ibn Umail was the author of several alchemical treatises, including The Silver Water and the Starry Earth and the Epistola Solis ad Lunam Crescentem (Letter from the Sun to the Waxing Moon). These writings were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages and circulated under the Latinized name Senior Zadith, becoming an important conduit through which Arabic alchemical knowledge entered Western European tradition.

The Tabula Chimica is characterized by its visionary, symbolic approach to alchemical teaching. Rather than providing direct procedural instructions, the text communicates through a series of allegorical images and narratives in which the principles of the alchemical work are figured as animals, celestial bodies, and mythological scenes. The text's most influential contribution to the Western alchemical vocabulary is its imagery of paired birds, one winged and one wingless, representing the volatile and fixed principles that must be bonded together in the alchemical work. This bird imagery became one of the most common motifs in European alchemical illustration, appearing in manuscripts and printed books from the thirteenth century onward.

De Jong traces the winged and wingless bird motif of Emblem VII of the Atalanta Fugiens directly to Senior Zadith's Tabula Chimica. In this emblem, two birds are depicted together, one capable of flight and one earthbound, and they must be joined so that the volatile spirit is fixed to the corporeal body while the corporeal body is animated by the volatile spirit. The chemical process encoded in this allegory is the fixation of a volatile substance (mercury, quicksilver, or a volatile spirit) through combination with a fixed substance (sulphur, a metallic body), producing a new compound that is neither purely volatile nor purely fixed but participates in both natures.

The Tabula Chimica also contributes to Emblem XXX of the Atalanta Fugiens, where De Jong identifies a mixture of allegorical material from Senior's text and from Lambsprinck's De Lapide Philosophico. This blending of Arabic-origin and German-origin alchemical imagery is characteristic of Maier's synthetic method, which draws freely on sources from across the entire tradition without regard for their geographical or chronological origin.

De Jong's bibliography notes that the first printed edition of the Tabula Chimica dates from 1566, published at Strasbourg, and that the standard text used by Maier appeared in the fifth volume of the Theatrum Chemicum. The scholarly reconstruction of Muhammad ibn Umail's identity and the Arabic origins of the text was accomplished by Stapleton and Ruska in the early twentieth century, long after Maier's time. Maier knew the text only as the work of Senior Zadith, an ancient philosophical authority in the chain of alchemical wisdom.

For the modern reader, the Tabula Chimica illustrates the Arabic contribution to European alchemy, a contribution that was fundamental but often obscured by Latinization. When Maier cites Senior Zadith in his discourses, he is drawing on a tenth-century Arabic alchemical tradition that entered Europe through the translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The bird symbolism that Senior Zadith transmitted to Western alchemy became one of its most recognizable and enduring images.